r ' — N 

'    LIBRARY    ^ 

UNIVERSITY  OF 
CALlfORNIA 

SAN  DIEGO 


ir.  Thomas  E.  Kneeland 
99  Wildwood  Street 
nchester,  Massachusetts 


Digitized  by  the  internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/dewittmillerOOvinciala 


DEWITT   MILLER 


DEWITT  MILLER 

About  1894 


DEWITT  MILLER 

A   BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

BY 

LEON  H.  VINCENT 


CAMBRIDGE 

Printed  at  the  Riverside  Press 
MCMXII 


COPYRIGHT,    1 91 2,    BY   LEON    H.    VINCENT 


OF  THIS  EDITION  ONE  THOUSAND 
COPIES  HAVE  BEEN  PRINTED  FROM 
TYPE  AND  THE  TYPE  DISTRIBUTED 


TO 

JOHN  IRVIN  CASSEDY 


CONTENTS 

I.  EARLY  LIFE  1 

II.  THE  NOMADIC  LECTURER  13 

III.  ON  THE  ROAD  26 

IV.  THE  BOOK-COLLECTOR  40 
V.  AT   *THE  ORCHARD*  54 

VI.  THE  LIBRARY  68 

VII.  BOOKS  AND  READING  81 

VIII.  THE  CONVERSER  90 

IX.  SAYINGS  AND   INSCRIPTIONS  103 

X.  PERSONAL  CHARACTERISTICS  117 

XI.  MORE  PERSONAL  CHARACTERISTICS      131 

XII.  THE  LAST  CHAPTER  144 


This  biographical  sketch  has  been  written 
with  a  particular  audience  in  mind,  an  audi- 
ence wholly  made  up  of  people  who  knew  De- 
witt  Miller  and  liked  him.  It  is  designedly 
personal  and  anecdotal,  and  will  be  best  read 
in  the  spirit  in  which  one  would  read  a  letter. 
Doubtless  the  letter  is  too  long  drawn  out,  but 
it  was  not  possible  with  the  material  at  com- 
mand to  make  it  brief.  Only  by  rigid  compres- 
sion has  it  been  brought  within  the  present 
limits. 

The  facts  concerning  Miller's  boyhood  and 
school-days  have  been  mostly  supplied  by  his 
sister,  Mrs.  Webb,  and  by  Doctor  King,  his 
former  principal  at  Fort  Edward  Institute.  A 
scrap-book  filled  with  newspaper  clippings, 
some  of  them  very  amusing,  throws  plenty  of 
light  on  the  period  between  1876  and  1885.  A 
few  notes,  made  at  the  time  the  half-veiled 
[1] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

portrait  of  Miller  as  *The  Bibliotaph'  was 
sketched,  have  been  drawn  on.  For  all  else  the 
writer  has  depended  on  his  memory,  and  can- 
not be  grateful  enough  to  the  friends  who  have 
jogged  that  memory  from  time  to  time. 

This  remarkable  collector  of  books  was  the 
only  son  of  Jahu  and  Phebe  (Sejnnour)  Miller, 
of  Westchester  County,  New  York.  His  father 
was  a  farmer,  and  had  been  at  one  time  a  black- 
smith. Miller  was  born  on  March  1,  1857,  at 
the  little  village  of  Gross  River,  four  and  a  half 
miles  from  Katonah,  and  was  christened  Jahu 
Dewitt. 

The  first  of  his  two  given  names  often  struck 
people  as  being  exceedingly  odd.  They  could 
understand  how  a  man  might  be  called  Jehu 
but  Jahu  passed  their  comprehension.  Miller's 
signature  was  as  legible  as  are  most  signatures, 
but  hotel-clerks  and  telegraph-operators  in- 
sisted on  writing  him  down  as  *John.'  He 
figures  as  John  Dewitt  Miller  in  at  least  one 
edition  of  Who  '5  Who  in  America.  Convinced 

[2] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

finally  that  there  was  no  hope  of  teaching  a 
certain  part  of  the  public  (a  part  with  whom  he 
was  in  daily  touch)  to  master  so  simple  yet  so 
unusual  a  name,  and  acting  on  the  advice  of  a 
friend,  he  began  to  sign  himself  Dewitt  Miller. 
After  that  the  occasions  were  rare  on  which  he 
found  his  name  misprinted. 

But  to  his  intimates,  and  to  some  who  were 
not,  he  was  never  known  by  any  other  name 
than  Jahu.  If  through  inadvertence  we  called 
him  Dewitt  to  his  face,  he  always  gave  an 
ironical  *Ha!  Ha!'  which  meant  that,  while  he 
did  not  consider  himself  to  be  putting  on  airs 
in  signing  himself  thus,  we  were  in  not  using 
the  old-fashioned  name  that  we  knew  he  pre- 
ferred. 

Like  other  country  boys  he  went  to  the  dis- 
trict school,  and  in  1871,  at  the  age  of  fourteen 
and  a  half,  entered  the  Collegiate  Institute  at 
Fort  Edward,  New  York,  was  graduated  in  the 
college  preparatory  course  and  became  at  once 
a  member  of  the  faculty.  One  of  his  note- 
[3] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

books  shows  that  he  taught  classes  in  arithme- 
tic, test  spelling,  grammar,  beginners'  Latin, 
Cicero,  logic,  and  English  Uterature;  in  other 
words,  and  as  a  famous  humorist  said  of  his 
own  pedagogical  experience,  he  held  not  a 
'chair'  but  a  'settee.'  He  also  acted  as  libra- 
rian and  was  reputed  to  have  devoured  the 
contents  of  the  school-collection.  Knowing  his 
skill  in  getting  at  the  heart  of  any  book  that 
struck  his  fancy,  one  can  understand  how 
the  remark  might  be  in  a  sense  perfectly 
true. 

Doctor  King  describes  Miller  at  the  age  of 
seventeen  as  'a  broad-shouldered  youth,  his 
*big  head  covered  with  abundant  coarse  brown 
*  hair,  which  reminded  one  of  the  portraits  of 
'Andrew  Jackson.'  He  also  speaks  of  the 
'grimy  white  overcoat'  which  the  young  man 
affected,  a  garment  much  too  big  for  him  and 
which  he  doubtless  wore  as  the  outward  sym- 
bol of  an  unswerving  loyalty  to  the  New  York 
journalist  he  most  admired.  At  what  time  the 
[4] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

white  beaver  hat  was  added  to  his  wardrobe  is 
not  known. 

It  is  probable  that  he  was  active  in  debating 
societies  at  Fort  Edward,  and  conspicuous  for 
his  skill  and  force  in  declamation.  He  had  even 
then  a  vocabulary  which  always  astonished  and 
often  diverted  those  who  heard  him  speak.  He 
began  to  correspond  for  newspapers,  and  some- 
times embroiled  himself  in  disputes  with  edi- 
tors and  others,  being  a  positive  and  somewhat 
contentious  young  gentleman,  much  addicted 
to  emphatic  language. 

His  first  lecture  was  given  *at  a  Grange  pic- 
*nic  at  Peach  Lake,  in  the  summer  of  1874.'  It 
was  *a  great  success.'  One  never  thinks  of  an 
audience  of  farmers  and  their  wives  as  the 
easiest  in  the  world  to  hold,  and  that  Miller 
could  hold  them  at  the  tender  age  of  seventeen 
is,  perhaps,  a  fact  worth  noting.  About  the 
same  time  he  preached  his  first  sermon  in  the 
little  Methodist  Church  at  Cross  River,  and 
was  looking  on  the  ministry  as  his  vocation. 
[5] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

It  is  not  difficult  to  see  how  this  came  about. 
Brought  up  in  a  denomination  which  insists  on 
having  ministers  who  can  speak  fluently  and 
forcibly,  a  youth  with  the  oratorical  gift  might 
conclude  with  perfect  sincerity  that  he  had  in 
addition  to  this  all  other  important  gifts. 

At  one  time  in  his  life  he  inclined  strongly 
towards  journalism.  Horace  Greeley  was  one 
of  his  idols.  There  is  a  story  (probably  apocry- 
phal) that  when  a  mere  boy  he  accompanied 
Greeley  on  one  of  his  shorter  lecturing  tours 
for  the  honor  of  carrying  the  great  man's  valise. 
He  certainly  did  a  great  deal  of  newspaper 
work  after  leaving  Fort  Edward,  but  always 
as  a  free  lance.  To  the  weeklies  he  contributed 
such  papers  as  'A  Day  at  Concord,'  published 
in  the  'Christian  Union,'  and  his  'Reminis- 
*cences  of  William  Cullen  Bryant'  which  ap- 
peared in  the  'Independent.'  He  led  rather 
an  unsettled  existence  for  three  or  four  years, 
as  an  occasional  lecturer,  a  stump-speaker, 
a  journalist,  and  even  a  man  of  business;  he 
[6] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

would  sometimes  describe  with  much  humor 
his  brief  career  as  a  shipping-clerk  with  a  large 
mercantile  house  in  New  York  City.  That  he 
ever  caused  his  parents  real  anxiety  no  one 
who  knew  Miller  can  believe ;  that  at  this  period 
of  his  history  he  kept  them  in  a  state  of  chronic 
astonishment  no  one  who  knew  him  can  doubt. 
In  the  fall  of  1880  he  went  back  to  school 
work.  An  early  lecture-list  describes  him  as 
'Professor  of  History  and  Mental  Philosophy* 
at  Pennington  Seminary,  Pennington,  New 
Jersey;  at  the  bottom  of  the  circular  are  the 
words  *  terms  liberal.'  He  was  drifting  little 
by  little  towards  the  mode  of  life  for  which  his 
wayward  genius  best  fitted  him,  and  he  had 
already  discovered  that  one  must  get  one's 
wares  before  the  public  somehow,  by  means  of 
liberal  terms  if  it  could  be  done  in  no  other 
way.  Many  articles,  relating  for  the  most  part 
to  school  happenings,  were  contributed  by  him 
to  Trenton  newspapers,  and  all  carefully  writ- 
ten. He  acted  as  librarian  at  the  Seminary, 
[7] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

and  his  taste  is  distinctly  shown  in  the  list  of 
magazines  and  journals  that  were  provided  for 
the  reading-room. 

For  some  months  he  preached  in  the  Warren 
Street  Church  in  Trenton,  and  packed  the 
little  building  to  the  doors  with  listeners  eager 
to  hear  him  on  any  topic,  and  especially  curi- 
ous about  his  sermons  on  the  amusement  ques- 
tion. His  un-Methodistical  attitude  might  well 
have  created  an  excitement.  Not  a  few  hard 
names  were  hurled  at  him.  People  also  wrote 
to  the  newspapers  attacking  him  on  account  of 
the  style  of  his  garments.  Even  if  these  critics 
were  displeased  with  many  features  of  his  dress 
they  might  at  least  have  been  placated  to  some 
little  extent  by  the  sumptuous  black  velvet 
waistcoat  of  clerical  cut  in  which  he  appears  in 
one  of  his  photographs.  It  was  Miller's  fate 
always  to  keep  his  little  world  in  a  state  of  un- 
rest because  he  did  not  'dress  like  other  men.* 
He  could  not  have  been  a  conformist  even  had 
he  been  so  minded. 

[81 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

His  name  appears  among  the  list  of  Trenton 
ministers  who  were  invited  to  open  the  sessions 
of  the  State  Legislature  with  prayer.  At  an 
election  in  November,  1882,  he  served  hot  cof- 
fee to  the  voters  of  one  precinct,  but  not  in 
person.  His  placard  commending  the  drink  as 
a  substitute  for  what  is  commonly  drunk  on 
election  days,  was  characteristic.  'You  won't 
'  have  to  be  taken  home  by  a  policeman,  and 
*  won't  be  ashamed  to  see  your  wife,'  is  a  typical 
sentence.  Miller  paid  for  five  hundred  cups  of 
coffee  that  day,  and  a  proportionate  amount 
of  'good  rich  cream.'  Voters  from  neighbor- 
ing precincts  found  it  convenient  to  visit  his 
stand. 

From  Trenton  he  went  to  Saint  James's 
Methodist  Episcopal  Church,  New  Brunswick, 
and  thence,  for  about  one  year,  to  the  Emman- 
uel Reformed  Episcopal  Church  in  Kensing- 
ton, Philadelphia.  By  that  time  (the  spring  of 
1885)  the  demand  for  his  lectures  had  become 
so  marked  as  to  justify  him  in  leaving  the  pul- 
[9] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

pit  for  the  platform.  He  did  well  to  make  the 
change,  and  to  make  it  before  he  had  grown 
inured  to  what  is  commonly  called  a  'regular' 
mode  of  life.  Now  he  could  exhort  the  public 
in  his  own  way,  on  his  own  themes,  and  with- 
out giving  offence.  It  was  once  said  of  him 
that  he  always  lectured  when  he  preached,  and 
preached  when  he  lectured.  The  characteriza- 
tion is  not  entirely  amiss. 

He  gave  his  business  to  a  bureau  called  the 
*  Bryant  Literary  Union,'  probably  at  the  in- 
stance of  his  friend  Mr.  Wallace  Bruce,  whom 
one  remembers  as  sounding  Miller's  praises  in 
the  most  cordial  fashion.  He  was  under  the 
Slayton  management  for  a  while,  and  for  many 
years  with  the  Reverend  S.  B.  Hershey  and  his 
coadjutors,  Mr.  Stout  and  Mr.  Pelham.  One 
heard  of  him  at  Teachers'  Institutes  and  else- 
where, and  met  him  at  the  various  Chautau- 
qua assemblies  throughout  the  Middle  West. 
Many  tales  circulated  among  the  fraternity 
concerning  his  oddities  of  dress  and  manner, 
[10] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

his  wit,  his  inimitable  story-telling,  his  un- 
quenchable spirits,  and  his  generous  ways. 

When  asked  whether  he  lived  in  Philadel- 
phia, Miller  would  reply,  *  I  live  there  as  much 
as  I  live  anywhere.'  His  menage  was  extremely 
simple,  consisting  as  it  did  of  a  membership  in 
the  Union  League  Club,  a  lock-box  at  the  post- 
office  with  some  one  to  look  after  the  contents, 
and  a  cedar-chest  at  his  tailor's.  He  became 
a  member  of  *The  Players,'  in  New  York,  in 
1892,  and  the  few  who  knew  him  there  also 
knew  how  devoted  he  was  to  the  interests  of 
that  attractive  club.  Some  other  affiliations 
he  had,  but  they  were  with  book-publishing 
clubs,  bibliographical  societies,  and  the  like. 

His  library  —  with  the  exception  of  so  much 
of  it  as  had  accompanied  him  in  his  progress 
from  Pennington  to  Philadelphia  —  was  at  the 
farm-house  at  Cross  River.  After  his  mother's 
death  the  books  journeyed  to  Carmel,  in  Put- 
nam County,  where  a  country  store  was  hired 
for  their  accommodation  and  the  door-key 

[11] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

handed  over  to  his  sister.  With  his  library- 
sixty  miles  north  of  New  York,  his  wardrobe  in 
Philadelphia,  and  himself  in  the  West,  Miller 
might  have  described  himself  as  being  widely 
scattered.  He  felt  no  inconvenience  and  would 
have  started  at  an  hour's  notice  for  New  Zea- 
land or  Australia.  He  often  talked  of  a  lecture- 
tour  in  those  countries  and  the  wonder  is  that 
he  did  not  go,  so  strong  was  his  lust  of  travel. 
In  a  word,  he  rejoiced  in  his  freedom,  was 
stimulated  by  the  audiences  that  he  faced 
nightly,  and  found  his  speeches  growing  better 
and  better  with  every  repetition. 


II 

He  gave  what  are  called  *  popular  lectures.' 
They  were  entitled  'The  Uses  of  Ugliness,' 
*The  Stranger  at  Our  Gates,'  'Our  Country's 

*  Possibilities  and  Perils,'  'The  Self-Sufficiency 
*of  the  Republic,'  and  'The  Reveries  of  a 

*  Bachelor.'  The  last  of  the  five  is  the  one  that 
formerly  went  under  the  name  of  'Love,  Court- 

*  ship,  and  Marriage,'  and  a  very  amusing  dis- 
course it  was,  call  it  how  he  would.  He  had 
other  speeches  besides  these,  but  his  reputation 
as  a  lecturer  mainly  rests  on  the  group  of  five, 
all  characteristic  examples  of  his  art. 

There  are  lectures  (on  a  variety  of  topics) 
which  are  popular,  and  there  are  also  'popular 
lectures.'  Bureau-managers  and  committees 
attach  a  particular  meaning  to  the  latter 
phrase;  it  means  a  lecture  of  a  distinct  sort. 

One  would  not  wish  to  be  understood  as 
speaking  lightly  of  the  'popular  lecture.'  It  has 
[  13  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

many  and  great  virtues.  The  ingenuity  often 
shown  in  its  construction  and  the  surprising 
effectiveness  of  the  deUvery  are  wholly  admir- 
able. But  one  may  be  allowed  to  note  the 
strong  family  resemblance  that  obtains  among 
these  discourses,  various  as  are  their  titles  and 
their  substance.  Every  'popular  lecture'  is 
first  cousin  to  every  other  'popular  lecture.' 

These  addresses  abound  in  anecdote  and 
flights  of  rhetoric.  They  always  contain  a  mix- 
ture of  the  pathetic  and  the  humorous,  with 
bold  and  unexpected  transitions  from  the  one 
to  the  other.  Always  intensely  patriotic  in 
tone,  not  to  say  jingoish,  their  effect  is  to  bring 
home  with  irresistible  force  to  the  hearer  — 
who  may  have  forgotten  it  for  the  moment  — 
the  great  truth  that  he  is  indeed  a  citizen  of  a 
great  country;  he  thanks  Heaven  that  he  was 
born  an  American,  and  his  heart  overflows 
with  sympathy  for  dwellers  in  benighted  re- 
gions of  the  earth  like  England,  France,  and 
Germany.  A  strong  appeal  is  made  to  the  audi- 
[  14  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

ence  on  the  side  of  the  domestic  affections, 
more  or  less  in  the  style  of  Mr.  Barnes  New- 
come,  and  there  still  remain  parts  of  the  United 
States  where  it  is  quite  safe  for  the  lecturer  to 
announce  that  woman's  true  sphere  is  in  the 
home. 

When  theological  matters  are  touched  on 
there  is  a  not  too  pronounced  leaning  towards 
old-fashioned  orthodoxy.  The  speaker  believes 
in  temperance,  the  flag,  the  public  schools, 
freedom  of  the  press,  and  freedom  of  the  bal- 
lot. There  are  also  many  things  in  which  he 
does  not  believe.  He  is  opposed,  for  instance, 
to  allowing  American  girls  to  marry  foreign 
noblemen.  His  hearers  are  with  hun  on  this 
vital  question.  That  dukes,  marquises,  and 
viscounts  should  come  over  here  in  droves 
every  spring  to  carry  off  our  daughters  —  and 
that  they  do  so  is  notorious  —  is  an  evil  under 
the  sun;  the  mere  thought  of  it  is  not  to  be 
patiently  borne  by  any  self-respecting  lyceum 
audience  in  the  country. 
[  15] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Unjustly  superficial  as  is  the  above  descrip- 
tion of  the  'popular  lecture,'  it  is  correct  in 
that  it  indicates  a  few  of  the  points  which  an 
exhaustive  analysis  would  be  certain  to  bring 
out.  One  has  long  since  learned  not  to  look  for 
originality  in  the  substance  of  these  discourses, 
but  to  enjoy  the  men  who  give  the  lectures, 
and  to  admire  in  particular  their  mastery  of 
the  art  of  speaking. 

Miller  was  one  of  the  best  of  his  tribe,  but 
he  never  pretended  to  be  an  original  thinker. 
He  would  have  laughed  at  the  misguided  friend 
who  should  attempt  seriously  to  make  him  out 
anything  of  the  sort.  He  was  an  original  man, 
a  character,  and  could  not  utter  a  common- 
place in  a  commonplace  way.  And  that  he  was 
also  a  born  orator  admits  of  no  question.  It 
was  a  pleasure  to  him  to  face  an  audience. 
He  spoke  easily  and  well,  and  his  thought 
always  took  the  oratorical  rather  than  the 
literary  form.  He  liked  to  make  use  of  anti- 
thesis, to  invent  daring  figures  of  speech,  to 
[  16] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

indulge  in  broad  and  humorous  exaggeration, 
to  pile  up  cloud-capped  towers  of  brilliant 
imagery. 

His  work  never  became  stale  and  mechanical. 
A  lecture  might  be  given  two  hundred  times 
and  not  be  given  twice  alike.  The  frame-work 
remained  unchanged  and  many  anecdotes  per- 
sisted, all  else  was  in  a  state  of  continual  fluc- 
tuation. No  man  lived  more  intensely  in  the 
Present  than  did  he,  and  his  oldest  speeches 
showed  that  he  was  perfectly  cognizant  of  what 
had  happened  in  the  round  world  within  the 
last  twenty-four  hours.  There  were  times  when 
he  created  the  illusion  of  having  prepared  the 
lecture  for  the  particular  audience  he  saw 
before  him. 

He  disliked  to  make  new  lectures.  With  him 
as  with  many  men  the  making  of  a  lecture  was 
a  deliberate  process,  one  that  took  time,  as  well 
as  brains;  the  successful  speech  cannot  be 
tossed  off  in  an  afternoon.  And  having  raised 
a  crop  of  six  or  seven  effective  speeches  Miller 
[  17] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

was  content  with  the  fruits  of  his  husbandry, 
and  made  no  further  effort. 

For  years  he  had  in  mind  the  preparing  of  a 
course  on  the  great  American  orators.  He  col- 
lected a  vast  amount  of  material  pertinent  to 
the  subject,  so  much  in  fact  that  he  was  rather 
appalled  when  he  contemplated  it  in  bulk.  '  I 
*  shall  write  the  lectures  out  in  full,'  he  said, 
'and  read  them  at  first.'  We  who  knew  him 
well  doubted  his  ability  to  solve  the  problem 
by  that  method.  All  his  speeches  were  out- 
lined and  elaborated  in  his  head,  without  once 
putting  pen  to  paper.  He  would  have  been  ill 
at  ease  with  a  manuscript  before  him. 

Though  no  grain  of  vanity  entered  into  his 
composition  he  was  self-possessed  in  the  high- 
est degree  when  he  faced  an  audience.  One 
cannot  think  of  him  as  embarrassed  or  discon- 
certed. All  his  powers  were  always  at  his  com- 
mand. He  would  have  made  an  admirable 
debater. 

His  readiness  to  turn  to  good  account  the 
[  18] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

petty  annoyances  that  befall  a  public  speaker 
was  proverbial.  Unless  this  illustration  of 
Miller's  wit  be  confounded  in  my  memory 
with  a  similar  one  it  was  about  as  follows :  He 
was  lecturing  in  a  small  town  in  Michigan.  As 
he  made  some  violent  movement  of  the  body 
a  button  burst  from  his  waistcoat,  flew  to  the 
edge  of  the  platform,  and  bounding  off  de- 
scribed another  curve  to  the  floor.  The  light- 
minded  who  saw  the  button  go  laughed  out,  as 
the  light-minded,  and  some  who  are  not,  al- 
ways will.  Miller  instantly  begged  the  people 
on  the  front  benches  not  to  be  alarmed,  as 
there  was '  no  dangerwhatever  of  further  disin- 
tegration.' The  effect  of  the  remark  being  to 
make  them  laugh  yet  more,  and  with  reason,  he 
added  pleasantly  that  he  was  'gratified  to  find 
that  if  he  could  not  entertain  them  in  one  way 
he  certainly  could  in  another.' 

Among  the  best  of  his  gifts  was  his  voice.  It 
was  strong,  rich,  and  flexible.  He  often  mis- 
used it,  and  was  sure  to  do  so  when  he  became 
[19] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

impassioned.  If  criticised  for  this  he  would  say 
good-humoredly,  *Well,  I  made  them  hear  at 
any  rate.'  And  so  he  did.  Many  a  time  have  I 
heard  him  bellow  as  if  he  were  trying  to  reach 
the  farmers  in  the  next  county. 

He  had  an  expressive  mouth,  and  when  his 
face  was  in  repose  the  mouth  was  one  of  its 
most  attractive  features.  Let  him,  however, 
become  markedly  earnest  in  speech  and  he 
would  straightway  begin  to  twist  his  lips  into 
wonderful  shapes.  Whoever  has  heard  him 
speak  will  recall  his  way  of  drawing  the  mouth 
up  at  one  side  and  apparently  speaking  from 
that  side.  He  gave  his  friends  no  little  pleasure 
by  stoutly  denying  that  he  did  such  a  thing. 

Having  made  no  study  of  the  art  of  stage- 
presence  he  held  himself  as  he  would,  and 
waved  his  arms  in  the  way  that  Nature  taught 
him.  No  one  was  better  aware  of  his  oddities 
than  himself.  Once  when  he  was  speaking  in  a 
tent  on  an  extremely  hot  day,  and  his  manner 
of  flapping  the  air  caused  some  little  merri- 
[20] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

ment,  he  convulsed  the  audience  by  exclaim- 
ing, 'Some  of  my  gestures  are  for  emphasis, 
and  some  for  flies.' 

Many  people  addressed  him  as  'Doctor,'  in 
our  easy  American  fashion,  though  he  held  no 
academic  degree  of  any  sort.  At  the  South  he 
was  often  announced  as  the  Honorable  Dewitt 
Miller,  LL.D.  Much  as  he  disliked  this  sort  of 
thing  he  wasted  no  time  in  fretting  over  it;  he 
knew  the  slip-shod  habits  of  his  fellow-country- 
men, and  their  serene  indifference  to  the  truth 
(North  and  South  alike)  when  advertising  was 
in  question. 

Let  them  call  him  Doctor  or  Professor,  or 
what  they  would,  he  was  outwardly  as  indif- 
ferent to  these  appellations  as  a  Newfound- 
land dog  might  have  been.  In  private  he  gave 
vent  to  his  real  feelings  through  a  series  of 
ingenious  and  ironical  comments.  Few  pla- 
cards tickled  him  more  than  the  one  in  which 
he  was  heralded  to  an  admiring  Western  audi- 
ence as  'Author,  Philosopher,  and  Bibliopa/Zz.' 
[21  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Against  the  use  of  one  advertising  phrase 
he  always  protested  —  he  had  an  aversion  to 
being  called  a  humorous  lecturer.  'They  put 
me  at  a  great  disadvantage  by  that  sort  of 
announcement,'  he  would  say.  'I  am  not  a 
humorous  lecturer.  Things  present  themselves 
to  me  in  a  certain  light.  I  state  them  as  I  see 
them.  For  some  reason  or  other  people  laugh. 
But  —  I  —  am  —  not  —  a  —  humorous  — 
lecturer!' 

His  entire  freedom  from  the  instinct  for  self- 
advertising  did  not  prevent  his  enjoying  pri- 
vately manifestations  of  the  instinct  in  others. 
He  sought  long  and  diligently  for  copies  of  a 
circular,  on  the  front  page  of  which  was  dis- 
played a  large  picture  of  the  gentleman  whose 
wares  were  thus  presented  to  the  public,  and 
around  it  little  pictures  of  the  world's  greatest 
orators.  And  when,  walking  on  a  station-plat- 
form, he  caught  sight  of  a  trunk  belonging  to 
one  of  his  colleagues,  with  the  lecturer's  name 
on  it  in  big  white  letters,  and  LL.D.  after  the 
[22] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

name,  in  letters  equally  big  and  white,  Miller's 
face  with  its  varying  expressions  was  indeed  a 
study;  he  said  nothing,  merely  looked  more 
good  things  than  he  could  possibly  have  ut- 
tered. 

He  was  not  often  seen  at  the  performances  of 
his  brother  lecturers,  believing  in  self-denial 
with  respect  to  strong  mental  pleasures.  He 
would  go  once,  sometimes  twice,  rarely  oftener. 
*  As  much  as  may  be  ought  we  to  be  spared  the 
fearful  joy  of  hearing  one  another,'  he  would 
say. 

Seeing  him  buy  a  ticket  for  an  entertain- 
ment to  be  given  by  one  of  his  intimates  I 
said,  wonderingly,  *Do  you  pay  him  for  the 
privilege?' 

To  which  Miller  replied,  *  I  pay  him  if  I  go  — 
the  first  time;  he  pays  me  if  I  go  the  second.' 

Having  heard  all  the  best  men  in  his  profes- 
sion, and  not  a  few  of  the  worst,  and  being  pos- 
sessed of  excellent  judgment  in  these  matters, 
he  was  able  to  show  wherein  lay  the  secret  of  a 
[23] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

success,  and  what  was  the  cause  of  a  compara- 
tive failure.  No  one  gave  praise,  where  praise 
was  due,  in  a  franker  spirit,  but  he  preferred  to 
speak  well  of  a  man  behind  his  back. 

What  were  Miller's  earnings  by  his  lectures 
it  were  difficult  to  say;  I  doubt  whether  he 
knew  himself.  They  should  have  been  quite 
enough  for  his  way  of  life.  His  fees  were  not  of 
the  largest,  and  he  was  undoubtedly  worth 
more,  as  a  lyceum  'attraction,'  than  he  com- 
monly received.  To  him  attaches  in  part  the 
blame  for  any  disappointment  he  may  have 
felt;  from  the  very  beginning  he  underesti- 
mated the  commercial  value  of  his  work. 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  he  enjoyed  every  feature 
of  his  life.  The  long  railway  rides  were  never 
wearisome  to  him  nor  the  hotels  odious.  He 
was  always  imperturbable  and  good-humored. 
It  was  a  barren  town  that  did  not  afford  some 
diversion  in  the  way  of  book-hunting,  and  he 
had  the  gift  of  making  friends  wherever  he 
went.  He  lectured  with  zest,  hurried  back  to 
[24] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

his  room  to  change  his  clothes  (he  was  always 
dripping  with  perspiration  after  an  hour-and- 
a-half's  speech),  and  was  then  ready  for  supper 
and  a  talk  until  two  o'clock  in  the  morning. 


Ill 

Because  of  his  striking  appearance  he 
awakened  no  little  curiosity  as  he  went  from 
place  to  place.  He  was  often  taken  for  a 
clergyman,  as  indeed  he  was,  sometimes  for  a 
country  doctor,  not  infrequently  for  a  politi- 
cian. Men  have  approached  him,  smiling, 
with  an  air  of  certainty  in  the  tone  with  which 
they  put  the  query  of  *  Doctor  Talmage,  I  be- 
lieve?' More  than  once  he  was  addressed  as 
the  habitual  Democratic  presidential  candi- 
date, whom,  by  the  way,  he  did  not  in  the  least 
resemble. 

There  was  that  in  his  face  and  bearing  which 
gave  the  impression  of  his  being  a  man  accus- 
tomed to  sit  in  legislative  halls,  and  to  talk 
learnedly  on  reciprocity  and  the  tariff.  I  have 
seen  people  point  him  out  to  one  another  and 
stare  after  him  as  he  ambled  along  F  Street, 
in  Washington.  They  were  sure  that  he  must 
[26  1 


DEWITT  MILLER 

1906 


i''lL^i^:^i^i'i~^i' 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

that  moment  have  come  from  the  Capitol,  and 
be  now  on  his  way  home  to  meditate  great 
speeches  for  the  salvation  (or  the  ruin)  of  the 
country.  They  would  have  been  disappointed 
to  learn  that  he  was  just  in  from  the  suburbs, 
and  was  hurrying  to  Lowdermilk's  book-store 
on  no  more  serious  errand  than  the  buying  of  a 
first  edition  of  Beckford's  Vathek. 

We  liked  to  address  him  now  and  then  as 
Senator  Sorghum,  and  inquire  respectfully  as 
to  the  state  of  political  feeling  *up  to  Coscob.' 
He  always  replied  in  the  character  assigned 
him  and  never  failed  to  turn  the  tables  on  the 
interlocutor.  Indeed  it  was  not  worth  one's 
while  to  undertake  to  badger  him  unless  one 
was  prepared  to  undergo  a  capital  mauling  in 
return.  One  did  not  always  get  it,  but  that  was 
merely  because  he  was  not  in  the  mood. 

Miller  thought,  in  the  light  of  the  mistakes 

that  were  made,  and  the  resemblances  that 

were  fancifully  traced,  that  he  must  have  *a 

Protean  physiognomy.'   The  regular  inquiry 

[27] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

met  him  when  he  returned  from  a  long  journey, 
*Whom  have  you  been  taken  for  this  trip?' 

Two  or  three  winters  ago  he  boarded  a  Pull- 
man and  settled  himself  in  his  seat.  Across 
the  aisle  sat  a  gentleman  and  lady;  with  them 
was  a  little  girl.  The  child  stared  at  the  new- 
comer with  an  air  of  profound  and  respectful 
interest.  Presently  she  whispered  something 
to  her  father  who,  smiling,  shook  his  head.  In 
a  moment  or  two  the  gentleman  came  over  to 
Miller,  and  begging  his  pardon  for  disturbing 
him  said,  'I  think  you  may  be  interested  to 
know  that  my  little  daughter  has  just  asked  me 
if  you  were  George  Washington.' 

One  would  like  to  know  what  was  our  friend's 
comment;  it  is  certain  to  have  been  witty. 

Miller  was  much  diverted  by  the  efforts  of 
men  with  whom  he  came  in  occasional  contact 
—  clerks,  porters,  barbers,  waiters,  and  the 
like  —  to  learn  something  about  him.  They 
were  sure  that  he  was  a  personage  merely  from 
his  looks,  and  that  he  was  also  one  of  the  right 
[28] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

sort  they  were  firmly  convinced  from  his  friend- 
liness of  manner  and  the  generous  estimate  he 
put  on  their  services.  He  was  content,  how- 
ever, to  let  them  guess. 

There  was  a  certain  barber,  an  Anglo-Ger- 
man, most  polite  and  very  precise  of  speech, 
to  whose  shop  Miller  resorted  at  intervals. 
On  the  occasion  of  the  fourth  or  fifth  visit  the 
barber  approached  the  subject  nearest  his 
heart  in  this  way : 

Barber:  'You  are  an  Englishman?' 

Miller:  'No.' 

Barber  (in  a  tone  of  great  surprise) :  'Not  an 
Englishman?' 

Miller:  *No.' 

Barber  (evidently  much  disappointed):  *I  al- 
ways thought  that  you  were  an  Englishman.' 

Miller:  *No.' 

Barber  (very  apologetically):  *Then  I  with- 
draw my  thoughts.' 

Of  quite  another  sort  was  his  conversational 
encounter  with  a  plain  citizen  somewhere  out 
[29] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

in  Kansas.  He  was  waiting  for  his  train  on  the 
station  platform,  bareheaded  as  usual.  The 
plain  citizen  eyed  him  for  a  while,  and  then 
slouched  up  to  put  this  question:  'Are  you  a 
Frenchman?' 

*No,'  said  Miller,  *why  did  you  ask?' 
'Because,'  responded  the  other,  with  much 
deliberation,  'you  look  exactly  like  a  French 
cook  that  used  to  live  down  our  way,  and  when 
I  first  saw  you  I  thought  you  was  him.'  After 
a  moment's  pause  the  plain  citizen  added 
meditatively,  'He  was  the  meanest  man  I  ever 
knew.' 

Miller  held  firm  opinions  as  to  how  a  trav- 
eller should  conduct  himself  towards  the  ser- 
vants of  a  railway  company,  especially  those 
who  were  in  no  position  to  resent  a  liberty. 
His  idea  of  the  complete  boor  was  a  loud- 
mouthed man  who  hails  every  sleeping-car  por- 
ter as  '  George.'  He  maintained  that  the  fellow 
had  no  more  right  to  call  the  porter  'George' 
than  he  had  to  call  him  'Zerubbabel.'  His  own 
[30] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

attitude  was  always  that  of  perfect  considera- 
tion. 

Waiters  at  the  restaurants  which  Miller 
frequented  knew  him  for  a  brother  man  and 
were  glad  to  serve  him.  He  entertained  large 
views  on  the  subject  of  tips.  Before  the  meal 
was  half  eaten  one  might  expect  to  hear  him 
say,  *Now  what  shall  we  give  the  waiter?  He 's 
been  extremely  nice  to  us.  Don't  you  think 
so?' 

He  always  made  a  wonderful  show  of  being 
just  in  the  matter  of  tips,  maintaining  that  one 
should  give  what  was  right  and  no  more.  Yet  I 
cannot  recall  the  time  when  his  estimate  of 
what  was  right  did  not  greatly  exceed  my  own. 
His  theory  of  the  tip  might  have  been  expressed 
by  the  formula  'ten  per  cent  on  the  cost  of  the 
meal,'  but  in  practice  he  made  it  twenty  and 
twenty-five  per  cent. 

Miller  sometimes  astonished  the  chance 
observer  by  certain  eccentricities  of  dress. 
When  he  bought  a  new  hat  he  would  insist  on 
[31] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

its  being  punctured  with  numerous  fine  holes. 
By  taking  this  precaution,  and  adding  thereto 
the  more  effective  one  of  carrying  the  hat  in  his 
hand,  he  contrived  to  get  the  amount  of  air  he 
needed  for  his  scalp's  health.  At  one  time  he 
owned  a  soft  brown  felt  hat,  in  the  centre  of 
which  he  had  carved  a  hole  the  size  of  a  silver 
dollar.  At  some  hotel  where  he  was  stopping 
for  a  night  he  deposited  it  on  the  rack  outside 
the  dining-room  and  went  in  to  his  supper. 
When  he  came  out  and  looked  for  his  hat  he 
found  that  a  circular  piece  of  white  paper  had 
been  neatly  glued  over  the  orifice.  He  learned 
afterward  that  the  clerk  of  the  hotel  had  been 
the  instigator  of  this  bit  of  playfulness.  Mil- 
ler's letter  to  the  proprietor  apropos  of  the  in- 
dignity was  a  little  masterpiece.  He  quoted  it 
to  me  in  full,  and  now  I  regret  not  having  taken 
a  copy  of  it. 

Whether  it  did  any  good  may  well  be  doubted. 
The  striking  though  not  always  legible  hand- 
writing, the  many  abbreviations,  and  the  clev- 
[32] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

erly  involved  sentences  would  not  fit  the  doc- 
ument for  carrying  light  into  the  dark  places 
of  a  small-hotel  proprietor's  mind.  We  used  to 
tell  Miller  that  when  he  wished  to  administer 
a  rebuke  he  should  do  it  by  word  of  mouth, 
never  in  writing. 

While  Miller  seldom  wore  a  hat  and  did  not 
always  carry  one,  he  might  be  seen  in  city 
thoroughfares  with  appropriate  head-gear  con- 
ventionally placed.  He  had  an  immense  head 
and  a  wealth  of  hair,  and  as  he  always  bought 
his  hats  by  the  *size,'  paying  little  heed  to  the 
height  of  the  crown  or  the  width  of  the  brim, 
many  of  them  looked  too  small  for  their  wearer. 
Whereby  a  wag  was  led  to  say  to  me,  *Why 
does  your  eccentric  friend  wear  that  button 
on  the  top  of  his  head?'  I  explained  that  the 
object  in  question  was  a  hat.  *0h,  really!' 
exclaimed  the  wag;  *I  am  very  glad  to  learn 
that.  I  saw  him  at  a  distance  in  Copley  Square 
and  I  supposed  that  he  was  wearing  a  button.' 

Miller  resented  the  remark  at  first,  not  on 
[33] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

his  own  account  but  because  it  belittled  the 
hat.  Then  he  accepted  it  in  his  humorous  and 
philosophical  manner,  and  when  we  were  leav- 
ing the  hotel  he  said,  with  a  smile,  as  he  picked 
up  the  abused  article,  *  I  '11  wear  my  Lindsay- 
Swift  button.' 

A  man  who  speaks  sik  nights  a  week  for 
forty  consecutive  weeks,  often  travelling  two 
and  three  hundred  miles  between  each  pair  of 
lectures,  gets  in  the  way  of  underestimating 
the  importance  of  his  relation  to  a  particular 
audience.  He  is  a  little  astonished  to  find  that 
they  really  care  to  hear  him,  and  he  cannot 
quite  see  why  they  should  be  greatly  disturbed 
if  he  fail  to  make  his  appearance.  Miller  pre- 
ferred always  to  keep  his  engagements,  but  it 
has  been  remarked  that  he  was  singularly 
placid  when  he  missed  one. 

He  took  all  sorts  of  risks.   The  last  train 

that  would  bring  him  to  his  appointment  in 

time  was  the  train  for  him.  Six  or  seven  years 

ago  he  had  an  engagement  to  speak  at  Mays- 

[34] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

ville,  Kentucky.  The  committee  wrote  him 
urging  the  importance  of  his  coming  by  the 
eariier  of  two  afternoon  trains  from  Cincinnati. 
He  put  the  letter  in  his  pocket,  did  the  book- 
shops all  day,  and  took  the  second  train  ac- 
cording to  his  habit.  He  was  due  in  Maysville 
at  five  minutes  past  eight  and  arrived  there  at 
twenty  minutes  of  nine.  Leaving  his  bag  at  the 
station  he  ran  the  whole  distance  to  the  lecture- 
hall.  He  was  dishevelled,  black  with  car-soot, 
and  wet  with  perspiration.  A  lady  who  was 
present  told  me  that  *he  could  hardly  have 
looked  worse  had  he  driven  the  locomotive 
down  from  Cincinnati.' 

The  audience  resented  having  had  to  wait 
forty-five  minutes,  and  resented  even  more  the 
state  in  which  he  presented  himself.  But  Miller 
proved  to  be  as  eloquent  as  he  was  certainly 
travel-stained.  By  the  time  he  had  uttered  a 
dozen  sentences  his  hearers  forgot  their  griefs. 
They  were  captivated  by  him.  When  he  fin- 
ished talking  they  crowded  around  the  plat- 
[35] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

form  to  shake  his  hand,  an  attention  'a'  could 
never  abide,'  and  the  committee  refused  to  let 
him  leave  the  hall  until  he  had  fixed  approxi- 
mately a  date  for  a  second  lecture  that  same 
season. 

A  prospect  of  ten  consecutive  months  at 
hotels,  with  only  a  few  intervals  of  home  life,  is 
dreary  at  the  best.  Miller  was  one  of  those 
even-tempered  travellers  who  know  how  to 
make  the  best  of  the  worst  surroundings.  A 
room  looked  habitable  almost  from  the  mo- 
ment of  his  taking  possession.  No  matter  how 
angular  the  furniture,  how  repulsive  the  wall- 
paper, how  barren  the  outlook  from  the  win- 
dows, all  became  transfigured  in  the  light  of 
his  genial  presence.  A  row  of  books  was  set  up 
on  the  mantelpiece,  the  table  was  covered  with 
magazines,  book-catalogues,  and  newspapers, 
and  an  air  of  comfort  and  orderly  disorder 
reigned  at  once. 

Miller  had  his  favorite  camping-out  places 
when  on  the  road,  and  clung  to  them  as  he 
[36] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

clung  to  other  old  friends.  He  must  have  fre- 
quented the  Hotel  Grace  in  Chicago  for  not 
less  than  twenty-five  years.  When  in  Phila- 
delphia he  used  formerly  to  go  to  Zeiss*s,  in 
Walnut  Street.  Later  he  transferred  his  affec- 
tions to  the  Little  Hotel  Wilmot,  in  South 
Penn  Square.  The  quaint  old-world  air  of  this 
minute  hostelry  attracted  him,  and  he  never 
tired  of  the  swinging  sign  over  the  door.  *  Don't 
you  like  it?  Don't  you  like  it?'  he  would  say, 
pointing  upward.  The  location,  quite  near  to 
his  club  and  even  nearer  the  railway  station, 
was  a  convenient  one  for  him. 

Almost  from  boyhood  he  had  put  up  at  the 
Grand  Union  Hotel  in  New  York,  taking  great 
satisfaction  in  its  labyrinthine  passages  and 
the  cozy  grill-room  with  the  framed  prints  and 
programs.  It  was  chiefly  sentiment,  I  think, 
that  led  him  to  take  up  quarters  at  the  Claren- 
don, near  Union  Square.  That  was  the  hotel 
where  Thackeray  stopped  in  1853.  Miller  once 
asked  the  night-clerk  whether  it  was  known 
[37] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

what  room  or  rooms  Thackeray  had  occupied, 
and  was  told  that  the  man  who  was  on  duty  in 
the  day-time  could  probably  tell  him:  'He 
knows  all  our  regular  people.' 

Miller  had  little  work  in  New  England  the 
latter  part  of  his  life.  If  by  any  chance  he  came 
to  Boston  he  was  sure  to  take  a  room  at  the 
Crawford  House,  and  take  his  meals  at  Mar- 
ston's.  Identifying  the  hotel  in  ScoUay  Square 
with  the  Crawford's  of  Whittier's  poem  he  used 
to  regret  that  the  word  *inn'  had  not  been  re- 
tained. 

A  man  who  wanders  as  he  did,  from  Dan  to 
Beersheba,  will  find  much  to  incommode  him 
in  the  poorer  caravansaries.  *  Every  traveller 
'is  a  self-taught  entomologist,'  said  Oliver 
Wendell  Hohnes.  When  forced  to  put  up  with 
ill-kept  quarters  Miller  said  nothing,  but  re- 
joiced in  the  consciousness  of  being  a  pilgrim 
and  a  stranger  who  could  tarry  but  a  night. 
Going  to  his  room  once  at  some  large  and  old 
hotel,  the  name  of  which  I  have  (purposely) 
[38] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

forgotten,  I  was  struck  with  the  air  of  neglect 
that  hung  over  the  place. 

*  Don't  the  cockroaches  run,  Jahu,  when  you 
open  your  door  to  go  in?'  I  asked. 

*Run?'  he  exclaimed,  cheerfully;  *far  from 
it.  They  stand  and  wave  to  me.' 

Philosopher  though  he  was,  his  thoughts 
must  have  turned,  in  surroundings  like  these, 
to  certain  homes  where  everything  a  man  could 
ask  in  the  way  of  perfect  physical  surroundings 
and  unstinted  hospitality  awaited  him. 


IV 

Miller  looked  on  books  as  something  to  be 
acquired,  just  as  he  looked  on  dollars  as  some- 
thing to  be  got  rid  of.  From  this  clearly  defined 
position  he  never  varied  a  hair's  breadth. 

Sane  people  often  ask,  'What  makes  a  man 
want  to  collect  books? '  and  to  speak  truth,  one 
is  puzzled  to  know  how  to  answer  them.  Per- 
haps the  man  does  not  want  to  do  as  he  does, 
but  cannot  help  himself.  On  the  whole,  Miller's 
idiosyncrasy  is  best  accounted  for  as  the  phil- 
osopher accounted  for  the  relation  between 
wedges  and  logs  of  wood.  *  A  wedge  splits  logs,' 
said  this  acute  reasoner,  'by  virtue  of  a  log- 
splitting  quality  in  the  wedge.'  And  similarly, 
Dewitt  Miller  collected  books  by  virtue  of  a 
book-collecting  quality  in  Dewitt  Miller. 

He  seems  to  have  begun  heaping  up  treasures 
in  print  in  his  youth,  and  to  have  been  chiefly 
covetous  of  such  bibliographical  rarities  as 
[40] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Greeley's  The  American  Conflict,  Richardson's 
The  Field,  the  Dungeon,  and  the  Escape,  Wen- 
dell Phillips's  Orations,  and  the  Sermons  (in 
any  number  of  volumes)  of  Henry  Ward 
Beecher.  He  had  a  great  mass  of  anti-slavery 
and  Civil  War  literature  in  his  Library  at 
Forest  Glen,  near  Washington,  a  part  of  which 
certainly  represents  his  first  steps  toward  the 
forming  of  a  collection  of  his  own.  He  also 
yearned,  in  those  callow  days,  to  own  complete 
files  of  his  pet  newspapers,  and  would  even  go 
to  the  expense  of  having  them  bound.  These 
awful  tomes,  of  portentous  size  and  correspond- 
ing unwieldiness,  were  rather  an  annoyance  to 
him  in  later  years,  but  he  had  not  the  heart  to 
part  with  them. 

At  what  period  he  became  sensible  of  the 
charm  of  a  book  as  a  work  of  art  cannot  now  be 
determined.  It  must  have  been  a  little  prior  to 
1888,  for  in  that  year  he  was  collecting  the 
pretty  duodecimos  of  William  Pickering  and 
anything  with  Moxon's  imprint  on  the  title- 
[41] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

page.  From  me  he  learned  about  John  Basker- 
ville;  it  was  the  first  tune  I  had  the  privilege  of 
being  his  instructor  —  and  also  the  last.  Isaac 
H.  Hall,  of  the  Metropolitan  Museum,  had  put 
me  in  the  way  of  acquiring  the  little  Horace  of 
1762,  a  voliune  which  has  been  described  as 
the  *most  beautiful'  of  all  Baskerville's  books. 
For  a  time  I  carried  it  with  me  on  my  journey- 
ings,  to  gloat  over.  Miller  saw  it  in  my  posses- 
sion, plied  me  with  questions  about  it,  and  en- 
joyed no  peace  of  mind  until  he  had  procured 
a  copy  for  himself. 

His  enthusiasm  for  Baskerville  grew  until 
he  had  accumulated  enough  examples  of  the 
great  Birmingham  printer's  art  to  satisfy  his 
craving.  It  then  waned  a  little  but  never  en- 
tirely disappeared.  He  was  always  ready  to 
talk  about  this  prime  favorite  of  his.  A  me- 
moir of  Baskerville  was  printed  at  Cambridge, 
England,  in  1907,  and  in  the  list  of  subscribers 
may  be  read  the  name  of  Dewitt  Miller. 

When  he  had  conceived  a  passion  for  a  cer- 
[42] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

tain  printer  (or  author)  our  friend  could  not  be 
prevented  from  snapping  up  every  specimen 
of  the  man's  work  that  came  his  way.  This 
led  to  his  entertaining  unawares  a  niunber  of 
rather  distinguished  volumes.  He  had  picked 
up,  during  the  period  of  his  Baskerville  craze, 
four  charming  little  classics,  a  Lucretius,  a 
Horace,  and  two  others,  bound  in  grained  red 
leather.  Where  they  came  from,  or  what  they 
cost  him  he  was  never  able  to  tell.  For  years 
he  lost  sight  of  them,  or  lost  consciousness,  ra- 
ther; the  smiling  Uttle  red  books  were  always 
in  plain  sight. 

We  jogged  his  memory  about  them  one  day. 
He  asked  where  they  were,  got  them  down  from 
their  resting-place  on  a  gallery  shelf,  found  them 
delectable  and  purred  over  them  in  his  custo- 
mary style.  The  question  was  then  raised  of 
their  having  been  bound  by  Roger  Payne ;  it  was 
only  a  conjecture,  but  there  was  a  basis  for  it. 
Miller,  who  was  always  thoroughly  alive,  now 
began  to  live  one  hundred  and  twenty  seconds 
[43] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

to  the  minute.  Such  a  scurrying  among  books 
of  reference,  such  a  jotting  down  of  data,  and 
piling  up  of  proofs,  and  writing  of  letters  to 
able  authorities,  could  only  be  witnessed  when 
our  friend  was  on  the  bibliophilic  war-path. 
He  had  not  had  so  good  a  time  in  months. 

That  the  books  were  what  they  appeared  to 
be  he  was  perfectly  convinced  within  a  day 
or  two.  It  gave  him  immense  satisfaction  to 
learn  that  he  possessed  Baskervilles  bound  by 
Roger  Payne.  *  I  knew  that  I  had  distinguished 
guests  under  my  roof,'  he  said,  beaming,  'but  I 
was  not  aware  that  they  were  so  highly  con- 
nected.' Presently  he  added,  (it  was  the  only 
formula  he  permitted  himself  to  use  in  com- 
mending his  own  collection,)  *If  a  man  were 
to  take  the  trouble  to  go  over  these  volumes 
thoroughly  one  by  one,  he  might,  I  believe, 
discover  some  very  interesting  items.* 

This  was  the  last  of  Miller's  adventures 
among  books.    He  left  his  Library  shortly 
afterward,  and  never  saw  it  again. 
[44] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

*  I  care  nothing  for  first  editions,'  he  has  been 
overheard  to  say.  He  meant  no  more  than 
that  he  was  not  mad  about  them.  The  truth  is 
that  he  had  a  perfectly  healthy  interest  in 
first  editions  and  owned  a  great  many;  he  also 
liked  a  second  edition,  and  a  third,  and  even  a 
twenty-third.  No  one  has  heard  him  say 
that  he  cared  nothing  for  his  first  edition  of 
Boswell's  Johnson.  When  news  came  of  the 
splendid  sum  fetched  by  Gray's  Elegy  at  the 
Hoe  sale,  Miller  got  out  his  copy  for  inspection 
and  comment.  A  very  good  copy  it  was,  and 
cost  him  nearly  three  dollars. 

These  incidents  belong  to  a  later  period  of 
his  book-collecting  and  do  not  properly  fall 
within  the  limits  of  this  chapter.  We  are  to 
think  of  him  now  as  he  might  have  appeared 
almost  any  time  between  1887  and  1897,  when 
he  was  mastering  his  subject  and  rifling  the 
book-shops  between  New  York  and  Denver  of 
the  good  and  the  indifferent  alike.  It  may  be 
said  once  for  all  that  when  Miller  bought  a 
[45] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

poor  copy  of  a  thing  he  usually  had  a  good 
motive.  Either  there  was  a  gap  in  the  shelves 
devoted  to  a  certain  subject,  which  needed  to 
be  filled,  or  he  knew  of  some  one  to  whom  the 
book  in  any  form  would  be  a  god-send,  pro- 
vided it  was  complete  from  title-page  to  index. 
One  important  qualification  he  had  for  the 
rough-and-tumble  phases  of  book-hunting  — 
he  was  not  too  dainty.  For  a  man  who  spent 
so  large  a  fraction  of  his  time  at  the  Turkish 
bath  he  was  singularly  indifferent  to  dirt,  or 
rather,  to  the  kind  of  dirt  that  accumulates  on 
books.  If  he  suspected  that  the  treasure  he 
sought  might  be  lurking  in  the  heap  before  him 
he  went  gaily  at  it  with  both  hands.  He  clung 
to  swaying  step-ladders  at  a  perilous  height 
to  get  at  the  rows  of  books  which  your  true 
second-hand  dealer  always  keeps  concealed 
behind  other  rows,  lest  a  customer  should  learn 
of  their  existence  and  insist  on  laying  down 
money  in  exchange  for  them.  He  could  hunt 
books  from  nine  in  the  morning  until  five  in  the 
[46] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

afternoon,  and  be  as  fresh  and  enthusiastic  at 
the  end  of  the  day  as  he  was  at  the  beginning. 
That  he  did  not  run  his  legs  off  in  the  chase  was 
principally  due  to  the  fact  that  it  could  not  be 
done ;  for  years  together  he  seemed  incapable  of 
understanding  the  meaning  of  the  term  'physi- 
cal weariness.'  He  was  never  bored,  and  better 
still,  was  never  persuaded  of  the  futility  of  the 
whole  business.  In  short  he  was  a  thorough 
sportsman,  and  belonged,  by  virtue  of  his 
sportsman-like  qualities,  to  the  school  of  Heber 
and  of  Locker-Lampson. 

When  asked  what  he  aimed  at  in  his  collect- 
ing Miller  had  one  reply :  *The  building  up  of  a 
good  general  library.'  It  was  not  to  be  a  mu- 
seum of  bookish  curiosities  but  a  place  where  a 
man  might  read  to  heart's  content  on  many 
topics.  A  later  chapter  will  show,  though  im- 
perfectly, that  he  came  within  sight  of  his  goal. 

In  the  years  of  which  I  now  speak  Miller  got 
little  out  of  his  books  beyond  the  considerable 
pleasure  of  acquisition.  He  carried  a  few  with 
[47  1 


DEWITT  MILLER 

him,  a  dozen  or  twenty,  those  in  which  for  the 
time  being  he  was  particularly  interested;  the 
greater  number  went  to  his  sister's  house  in 
the  country  and  he  saw  them  not  above  two  or 
three  times  a  year.  But  it  was  something  to 
know  that  they  were  there,  and  to  dream  of  the 
time  when  he  might  so  order  his  life  as  to  ad- 
mit of  his  enjoying  a  month  or  two  every  year 
with  his  beloved  volumes. 

His  bills  for  expressage  must  have  been  for- 
midable. It  was  his  habit  to  accumulate  little 
hoards  of  books  at  the  shops  he  most  frequented. 
A  box  was  placed  for  his  convenience  under  a 
counter  and  into  it  would  go  whatever  he  had 
bought  there  or  in  that  vicinity.  These  small 
receptacles  he  called  his  bins.  At  intervals  he 
would  order  a  bin  cleared  and  the  contents 
shipped  to  some  point  where  he  proposed  to 
spend  a  few  weeks,  and  later  reshipped  to  New 
York;  whence  the  heavy  package,  augmented 
by  the  addition  of  numerous  small  packages, 
would  make  its  way  (always  by  express)  to  the 
[48] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

final  resting-place  up  country.  Miller  has  been 
known  to  resent  the  price  of  a  hotel  room,  but 
seldom  the  price  of  a  book,  and  never  the  cost 
of  carting  any  number  of  books  half  the  length 
of  the  continent. 

The  booksellers  generally  in  the  large  cities 
knew  him  and  welcomed  his  coming.  There 
were  very  few  shops  where  he  did  not  feel  at 
home.  His  criticism  of  the  places  he  disliked 
took  no  more  pronounced  form  than  *  I  never 
seem  to  find  anything  there,' or  'They  have, me 
judice,  an  exaggerated  notion  of  the  value  of  a 
book,'  or  *  At  that  store  the  efforts  of  ignorant 
and  officious  clerks  to  be  attentive  make  brows- 
ing difficult  if  not  impossible.'  He  was  driven 
out  of  one  book-shop  by  a  stripling  who  guessed, 
doubtless  from  Miller's  appearance  and  talk, 
that  he  must  certainly  be  in  want  of  Marie 
Corelli's  last  novel,  and  undertook  to  sell  him  a 
copy.  It  would  be  a  gifted  salesman  who  could 
persuade  Dewitt  Miller  to  buy  The  Sorrows  of 
Satan  or  The  Mighty  Atom  against  his  will. 
[49] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

When  money  was  plentiful  he  bought  as  he 
would ;  when  depressed  financially  (the  best  of 
lecturers  have  their  dark  days)  he  showed  re- 
markable skill  in  rooting  out  good  things  from 
the  five  and  ten  cent  shelves  and  boxes.  His 
crowning  achievement,  in  the  role  of  poor 
collector,  was  in  *  booking'  for  six  consecutive 
days  on  fifty  cents  a  day.  He  performed  this 
feat  in  the  city  of  Philadelphia  one  poverty- 
stricken  September.  Truly  amazing  was  it  at 
night-fall  to  see  what  he  would  bring  out  of  the 
dark-green  lawyer's  bag  which  he  always  car- 
ried on  his  expeditions  —  good  pamphlets  his- 
torical and  literary,  clean  copies  of  old  maga- 
zines containing  the  first  issue  of  some  famous 
tale  or  essay,  and  many  a  two-volume  novel 
of  the  1837  period,  bound  in  plain  boards  with 
paper  labels. 

He  bought  for  five  cents  the  first  English 

edition  of  Tupper's  Proverbial  Philosophy  and 

rejoiced  in  its  spotless  condition  as  a  hopeful 

sign  that  it  had  never  been  read.  The  book  is 

[50] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

not  one  to  yearn  for,  either  as  a  bibliophile  or  an 
amateur  of  letters.  Nevertheless  it  has  a  his- 
tory, and  any  book  with  a  history,  any  book 
that  has  held  its  own  in  spite  of  jeers  and 
anathemas,  was  a  book  for  the  liberal-minded 
Miller.  He  was  best  pleased,  when  during  this 
impoverished  period,  he  lighted  on  copies  of 
*The  Token,'  with  the  old-fashioned  steel 
engravings  and  tales  *by  the  author  of  "The 
Gentle  Boy."'  Five  cents  did  not  seem  an 
extravagant  sum  to  lay  out  on  one  of  these. 

To  hear  him  descant  on  the  joys  and  possi- 
bilities of  book-hunting  on  fifty  cents  a  day  you 
would  have  said  that  he  preferred  it  to  any 
other  form  of  the  sport.  The  oratorical  instinct 
prompted  him  always  to  enlarge  on  an  idea,  to 
embroider  it  and  show  it  off  in  various  lights. 
He  preferred  existence  on  the  broad  scale. 
Convinced,  it  may  be,  that  he  would  never  be 
so  poor  again  he  took  real  pleasure  in  glorify- 
ing the  condition  in  which  he  found  himself  for 
the  moment. 

[51] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Go  where  Miller  would  the  opportunities  for 
buying  books  strewed  his  path,  and  he  often 
came  on  a  bargain  in  the  unlikeliest  of  places. 
On  one  of  his  flying  trips  to  Boston  he  asked 
where  he  might  go  to  have  his  trousers  re- 
paired —  the  ones  he  was  wearing.  I  took  him 
to  the  shop  of  an  earnest  little  Hebrew  tailor  of 
my  acquaintance.  Miller  sat  behind  a  screen 
while  the  mending  was  in  progress.  On  the 
broad  window-sill  of  the  shop  lay  three  books, 
an  edition  of  Shakespeare,  possibly  that  to 
which  B.  W.  Procter  put  his  name,  and  for 
which  Kenny  Meadows  drew  illustrations.  I 
told  Miller  that  here  was  a  bargain,  teased  him 
because  of  his  helplessness,  and  only  passed 
one  of  the  volumes  to  him  when  he  threatened 
to  come  out  into  the  light  of  day  as  he  was. 
Then  began  a  dialogue  between  the  book-col- 
lector and  the  tailor.  It  was  really  a  pleasant 
occasion,  and  may  readily  be  imagined :  Miller 
trouserless  behind  the  screen,  talking  in  his 
sonorous  voice,  and  the  little  tailor,  his  eyes 
[52] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

twinkling  'astride  the  immemorial  nose,'  mak- 
ing shrewd  responses  as  he  plied  the  needle,  and 
holding  out  for  a  price  he  thought  suitable  to 
this  his  first  excursion  into  the  realm  of  book- 
barter. 

He  was  no  Shylock,  the  little  man.  The 
price  he  asked  was  a  fair  one;  Miller  was  glad 
to  pay  it,  and  the  tailor  equally  glad  to  be  rid 
of  the  Shakespeare.  The  bargain  was  com- 
pleted by  the  time  the  last  stitch  was  taken. 
Our  friend  resumed  his  garment  and  walked 
off  with  the  books  under  his  arm. 


V 

Dewitt  Miller  accounted  himself  fortun- 
ate above  most  men  in  the  friends  he  possessed. 
Their  number  if  not  exactly  legion  was  at  all 
events  great.  Though  not  outwardly  demon- 
strative he  cherished  them  in  his  heart  of 
hearts,  and  had  a  thousand  ways  of  showing 
that  he  was  mindful  of  their  love.  They  on 
their  part  were  always  eager  to  do  more  for  him 
than  he  would  accept.  Their  prime  difficulty 
lay  in  making  him  understand  how  well  dis- 
posed they  were,  or  if  not  that,  then  in  per- 
suading him  to  act  on  the  understanding. 
He  was  the  least  calculating  of  men;  never  in 
the  slightest  degree  would  he  presume  on  a 
friendship. 

At  times  he  quite  irritated  people  by  his  odd 

way  of  holding  off.  Once  when  he  failed  to 

appear  in  season  at  a  house  where  for  him  the 

latch-string  always  hung  out,  the  impetuous 

[54] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

mistress  exclaimed,  'Well,  if  he  thinks  after  all 
these  years  that  he's  going  to  have  a  formal 
invitation  on  gilt-edged  paper,  he's  much  mis- 
taken.' 

Nevertheless  the  invitation  was  sent,  by 
telegram,  commanding  him  in  round  terms  to 
make  his  appearance  at  once,  and  no  longer  be- 
have like  a  pouting  school-boy.  As  a  matter 
of  course  he  promptly  came;  he  relished  a  mes- 
sage of  the  emphatic  sort. 

*Did  you  think  you  would  get  your  special 
gilt-edged  invitation,  Jahu?'  he  was  asked  as 
he  alighted  from  his  cab,  laden  with  two  fat 
suit-cases  and  a  shawl-strap  full  of  books. 

*I  was  sanguine  to  the  extent  of  listening 
for  early  intimations  of  its  approach,  Indian 
fashion,  with  one  ear  on  the  ground,'  he  re- 
plied. 

While  there  may  have  been  a  touch  of  the 

perverse  in  this  trick  of  holding  off,  (as  if  he 

were  waiting  to  be  urged  for  the  pleasure  of 

being  urged,)  it  is  safe  to  say  thatgenuine  deli- 

[55] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

cacy  lay  at  the  bottom  of  it.  Not  for  a  world  of 
first  editions  would  he  have  given  his  hosts  an 
excuse  for  thinking  that  they  had  had  a  little 
too  much  of  him. 

An  expression  often  on  Miller's  lips  was  '  So- 
and-So  has  been  very  good  to  me.'  To  name  by 
name  even  a  fair-sized  fraction  of  the  large 
number  of  people  who,  in  the  course  of  his 
life,  had  been  good  to  him,  is  not  the  purpose 
of  the  present  writer.  Still  less  is  it  his  idea  to 
assign  to  those  he  does  mention  a  sort  of  rank 
in  the  hierarchy  of  Dewitt  Miller's  affections. 
The  man  did  not  classify  his  friends,  any 
more  than  he  measured  out  his  gratitude  in 
proportion  to  the  nmnber  of  favors  he  had 
received. 

It  would  be  unjust  both  to  him  and  to  them 
not  to  make  clear  how  much  accrued  to  him  in 
the  way  of  good  fellowship  and  unstinted  hos- 
pitality through  his  acquaintance  with  Mr. 
and  Mrs.  Francis  Wilson,  and  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
John  Irvin  Cassedy.  From  the  status  of  a  man 
[56] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

with  no  home,  other  than  his  club  and  his  hotel, 
our  friend  passed  to  that  of  a  man  with  two 
homes,  one  near  New  York  City  and  one  near 
Washington. 

Miller  had  known  (and  admired)  Francis 
Wilson  as  a  comedian  for  some  time  before  he 
knew  him  as  a  friend.  The  two  collectors  were 
introduced  to  each  other  at  Morris's  book-shop, 
in  Chicago,  in  1891.  Wilson  used  to  give  for 
the  entertainment  of  his  friends  an  imitation 
of  Miller  as  he  appeared  to  him  at  that  first 
meeting,  taking  off  with  amusing  exactness  the 
pose,  the  gestures,  the  rapid  utterance,  the 
facial  contortions,  and  the  quick  *  teetering' 
step  with  which  he  shot  out  of  the  door  when 
the  brief  chat  was  at  an  end.  *  It  was  like  an 
electric  shock,'  said  Wilson.  *I  experienced 
him,  but  by  the  time  I  had  rubbed  my  eyes 
so  as  to  take  him  all  in,  he  was  gone.' 

Miller  paid  his  first  visit  to  *The  Orchard,' 
the  Wilson  home  at  New  Rochelle,  some  time 
the  following  autumn.  He  then  learned  that 
[57] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

while  *any  husband'  may  invite  a  man  to  his 
house,  it  pretty  much  rests  with  *any  wife'  to 
make  the  visit  a  source  of  pleasant  recollec- 
tions. He  never  forgot  the  cordiality  with 
which  he  was  received  by  the  lady  of  that 
hospitable  home. 

Miller  resembled  Washington  Irving  in  one 
particular  —  he  was  *  delightful  as  a  domestic 
animal.'  The  two  daughters  of  the  house,  small 
children  at  that  time,  were  pleased  to  find  that 
this  large,  well-languaged  gentleman  whom 
their  father  had  brought  out  of  the  West,  would 
play  hide-and-seek  with  them  just  before  their 
bed-time,  all  the  rooms  on  the  second  floor  be- 
ing darkened  for  the  purpose  and  everybody's 
shoes  taken  off,  and  that  he  could  be  persuaded 
at  long  intervals  to  delight  them  with  his  bear- 
dance.  Miller's  mimetic  gifts  were  slender,  but 
he  gave  a  pretty  good  imitation  of  a  laughing 
hyena  in  a  cage,  and  of  a  bear  clumsily  waltz- 
ing on  its  hind  legs.  Few  people  have  seen 
these  gems  of  art.  He  could  only  be  induced  to 

[58] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

perform  when  he  was  in  an  exalted  mood,  and 
had  as  an  audience  the  children  of  friends  he 
trusted. 

It  may  be  guessed  that  visits  so  successful, 
from  the  point  of  view  of  both  the  entertainers 
and  the  entertained,  would  be  frequently  re- 
peated. And  so  they  were.  Miller's  appear- 
ances at  *The  Orchard,'  year  after  year,  were 
only  a  little  less  regular  than  those  of  the  sea- 
sons. 

He  was  generally  there  in  the  month  of  Sep- 
tember, and  for  periods  varying  from  ten  days 
to  four  weeks.  A  room  known  as  the  *Tent 
Room'  was  assigned  him;  it  came  in  time  to 
be  known  as  his,  and  finally  to  be  called  by 
his  name.  He  always  brought  a  quantity  of 
books  with  him,  as  many  as  he  could  stagger 
under,  and  two  or  three  packages  followed  by 
express,  the  spoils  of  a  summer's  browsing 
among  the  book-shops  of  Chicago,  Kansas 
City,  and  Saint  Louis.  He  seldom  took  away 
above  a  tenth  of  what  he  brought,  and  in  conse- 

[59] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

quence  his  stock  of  literature  at  'The  Orchard' 
accumulated. 

Shelves  were  built  in  the  *Tent  Room'  for 
the  accommodation  of  Miller's  books,  and  then 
more  shelves.  When  every  available  foot  of 
wall-space  was  taken  up  shelves  were  erected 
for  the  new  arrivals  in  the  part  of  the  large  cen- 
tral hall  adjacent  to  his  domain,  and  finally 
the  books  overflowed  into  a  small  room  across 
the  hall.  The  outcome  was  that  when  Dewitt 
Miller  paid  his  long  vacation  visit  to  the  Wilson 
family  he  had  not  merely  the  use  of  his  host's 
many  and  well-chosen  books,  but  he  dropped 
into  a  comfortable  little  library  of  his  own,  a 
collection  of  not  less  than  fifteen  or  eighteen 
hundred  volumes. 

These  books  remained  at  *The  Orchard'  un- 
til that  attractive  residence  was  abandoned  by 
its  owners  in  favor  of  another.  They  were  then 
nearly  all  shipped  to  Forest  Glen,  whither  by 
this  time  the  bulk  of  Miller's  treasures  had 
gone. 

[60] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

The  advantage  of  having  a  large  library  in 
one  place,  and  subsidiary  libraries  elsewhere, 
does  not  need  to  be  explained  to  your  genuine 
collector  of  books.  Miller  often  found  it  of  use 
in  explaining  real  or  seeming  deficiencies  in  his 
stock.  If  some  notable  gap  were  discovered  he 
could  say,  *That  book  must  be  at  the  Glen,'  or 
*  Sowers  is  keeping  it  for  me,'  or  *  It  is  probably 
tucked  away  in  my  bin  at  Frank  Morris's.'  He 
would  add,  *But  I  have  it,  I  know-w-w  I  have 
it.'  And  lest  there  should  be  any  doubt  about 
his  having  it  he  would  improve  the  first  oppor- 
tunity to  buy  another  copy,  'So  as  to  have  one 
at  both  places  in  the  event  of  our  needing  to 
consult  it.'  With  him  any  excuse  sufficed  for 
the  buying  of  duplicates. 

A  man  who,  like  our  friend,  had  spent  the 
hottest  weeks  of  a  long  summer  in  uninter- 
rupted travelling  and  lecturing  through  ten 
states,  might  well  rejoice  when  finally  he  landed 
at  *The  Orchard.'  Miller  was  much  pleased 
with  a  custom  which  prevailed  there  of  serving 
[ftl  1 


DEWITT  MILLER 

a  first  breakfast  of  coffee  and  rolls  to  the  guests 
in  their  own  rooms  at  an  hour  of  their  own  nam- 
ing. For  all  that  he  was  such  an  active  fellow 
physically,  there  was  a  dash  of  the  sybarite  in 
him.  As  may  be  guessed  he  was  a  striking  fig- 
ure propped  on  the  pillows,  the  steaming  coffee- 
cup  on  a  little  table  at  his  left  hand,  the  coun- 
terpane littered  with  the  New  York  morning 
papers,  already  riddled  by  his  implacable  scis- 
sors, the  gigantic  bibliography  of  first  editions 
that  he  carried  for  years  sprawled  on  its  back 
within  reach,  twenty  sheets  of  common  hotel- 
stationery  covered  with  his  hieroglyphics  and 
inserted  between  the  leaves  where  new  entries 
were  to  be  made,  and  twice  twenty  books,  not 
*at  his  beddes  heed,'  but  scattered  over  such 
parts  of  the  bed  as  were  not  occupied  by  his 
very  large  self.  He  was  never  more  entertain- 
ing in  talk  than  at  these  morning  hours,  as  the 
master  of  the  house  can  bear  witness. 

Miller  became  greatly  attached  to  the  Wil- 
sons'  butler,  Maurice  Young.  He  used  to  say 
[62] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

that  his  idea  of  earthly  bliss  might  be  de- 
scribed somewhat  as  follows:  To  wake  up  in 
the  *Tent  Room'  after  a  good  night's  sleep, 
press  the  electric  button  at  the  head  of  the  bed 
by  which  he  regularly  summoned  Maurice,  who 
should  appear  in  due  time  with  the  tray  on 
which  were  disposed  the  pot  of  coffee,  the  rolls 
and  butter,  the  boiled  eggs,  the  marmalade, 
and  the  morning  papers.  Having  put  the  tray 
down  Maurice  would  leave  the  room  for  a  mo- 
ment, to  return  as  quickly  as  possible  with  a 
second  tray  on  which  should  lie  two  crisp  ten- 
dollar  bills  *to  buy  a  few  books  with.'  Thus 
fortified  in  stomach  and  in  purse  Miller  thought 
he  might  be  able  cheerfully  to  face  his  day. 
The  service  was  not  to  vary  from  January  to 
January. 

He  was  the  happiest  of  men  during  his  vaca- 
tion and  literally  basked  in  the  comfort  that 
surrounded  him.  As  busy  too  as  he  was  good- 
humored,  he  got  through  a  deal  of  work,  chiefly 
in  the  way  of  enlarging  his  stock  of  biblio- 
[63] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

graphical  knowledge,  supplemented  by  much 
letter-writing,  and  no  end  of  clipping  and 
pasting  of  the  clippings  in  the  backs  of 
books. 

All  his  whimsicalities  come  to  mind  as  one 
thinks  about  him  and  recalls  those  holidays, 
as  for  example,  his  trick  of  going  about  on  tip- 
toe with  a  springy  kind  of  step  that  set  every- 
thing near  him  to  vibrating.  This  he  always 
did,  for  he  was  most  considerate  of  the  comfort 
of  others,  when  some  one  he  wished  not  to  dis- 
turb was  taking  a  nap  or  writing  a  letter.  It 
was  his  way  of  being  quiet.  He  seemed  to  think 
that  if  he  made  no  noise  with  his  heels,  merely 
shook  the  whole  house,  all  was  well. 

At  'The  Orchard'  one  had  the  privilege  of 
becoming  acquainted  with  his  skill  at  the  only 
out-of-door  game  he  ever  played.  On  the  plot 
of  ground  back  of  the  house  were  an  excellent 
tennis-court  and  an  indifferent  croquet-field. 
When  it  was  learned  that  Miller  had  a  passion 
for  croquet  the  field  was  improved,  and  new 
[64] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

balls  and  mallets  ordered  from  the  city.  Many 
a  hot  contest  took  place  there,  for  the  man 
played  with  demoniacal  energy  and  proved  to 
be  invincible.  His  enthusiasm  was  catching 
and  through  one  unforgettable  season  every 
member  of  the  household  became  absorbed  in 
the  old-fashioned  game. 

The  sport  was  often  protracted  to  a  late 
hour.  One  picture  quite  vivid  to  my  mind  is  of 
a  game  that  was  fiercely  contested  after  night- 
fall. I  can  see  Miller  padding  over  the  turf 
mallet  in  hand,  and  the  two  little  girls  running 
about  in  a  state  of  intense  excitement,  holding 
their  small  lanterns  over  the  wickets  so  that 
the  combatants  might  see  to  make  their  shots, 
and  the  group  of  watchers  on  the  veranda,  jeer- 
ing or  applauding  as  the  fortunes  of  war  turned, 
but  rather  less  interested  in  the  outcome  than 
in  a  considerable  display  of  human  nature  on 
the  part  of  the  players.  Our  friend  fought  for 
victory;  you  might  take  all  his  books  and  ap- 
propriate the  contents  of  his  wallet,  but  you 
[65] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

might  not  rob  him  of  a  game  of  croquet  when 
it  was  in  his  power  to  prevent  you. 

He  could  never  be  persuaded  to  try  his  hand 
at  golf,  though  he  believed  that  in  so  far  as 
strength  is  an  important  element  of  success  he 
was  fitted  to  shine  at  the  game. 

*  Could  you  do  that? '  I  asked,  as  we  watched 
a  magnificent  drive. 

*I  am  not  at  all  sure  that  I  could  hit  the 
ball,'  he  replied ;  and  then  added,  with  his  char- 
acteristic chuckling  laugh,  *But  I  am  confident 
of  one  thing  —  if  I  ever  did  hit  it,  an  exploring 
party  provisioned  for  thirty  days  would  need 
to  be  sent  out  to  ascertain  its  whereabouts.' 

Knowing  Miller  for  the  most  entertaining 
and  amiable  of  house  companions  one  is 
tempted  to  speculate  as  to  the  sort  of  man  he 
would  have  been  in  a  home  of  his  own.  Con- 
sidering him  in  the  light  of  a  Benedict  one 
thing  at  least  can  be  predicated  —  his  wife 
would  never  have  had  to  ask  for  money. 

He  never  married.  Perhaps  it  is  well  that 
[66] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

he  did  not.  Marriage  means  surrender  —  to 
a  certain  extent.  The  compensations  are  re- 
ported to  be  enormous,  but  there  is  no  doubt 
as  to  the  fact  of  surrender.  Now  Miller  was 
at  heart  a  nomad,  a  blend  of  gipsy  scholar  and 
gipsy  book-hunter,  impatient  under  restriction 
of  any  sort,  though  commonly  betraying  his 
impatience  in  ways  not  unpleasant  but  most 
amusing  to  the  spectator.  Prescribe  a  social 
duty  for  him,  one  that  smacked  in  the  least 
of  the  conventional,  or  attempt  seriously  to 
regulate  his  movements,  and  you  had  a  prob- 
lem on  your  hands. 

Speaking  then  with  a  certain  amount  of 
exaggeration  one  may  say  of  Miller  that  if 
there  was  a  particular  place  to  which  he  ought 
to  go,  he  gave  the  impression  of  being  extremely 
loath  to  go  there.  Merely  because  of  this  idio- 
syncrasy he  was  better  off  as  a  bachelor.  Mar- 
riage means  a  home,  but  home  is  a  place  to 
which  even  the  wandering  lecturer  is  obliged 
occasionally  to  go. 


VI 

During  these  years  his  principal  library — 
a  much  smaller  collection  than  it  is  now,  but  of 
a  respectable  size,  nevertheless  —  was  at  Car- 
mel.  New  York,  housed  in  the  village  store  of 
which  mention  has  already  been  made.  Miller 
felt  that  the  books  were  safest  there,  where  his 
sister,  Mrs.  Webb,  could  overlook  them  from 
time  to  time,  but  he  never  pretended  that  they 
were  easy  to  get  at. 

They  might  have  remained  at  Carmel  to 
this  day  had  not  the  growth  of  his  friendship 
with  Mr.  and  Mrs.  John  Irvin  Cassedy  led 
to  their  proposing,  and  his  gladly  accepting, 
another  plan  for  the  care  of  his  bookish 
treasures. 

His  acquaintance  with  these  two  people, 

who  were  to  do  so  much  for  his  comfort,  began 

at  Norfolk,  Virginia,  where  for  some  years  they 

conducted  a  school  for  girls  and  young  women ; 

[68] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

he  twice  gave  the  annual  Commencement  ad- 
dress, and  lectured  for  them  on  yet  other  occa- 
sions. When,  in  1894,  they  founded  a  new 
school  at  Forest  Glen,  Maryland,  nine  miles 
from  Washington,  Miller  was  told  that  in  spite 
of  their  nearness  to  the  National  fountain-head 
of  oratory,  they  must  still  depend  in  a  measure 
on  his  services.  And  so  he  continued  his  visits, 
and  came  to  be  looked  on,  not  as  the  mere  non- 
resident lecturer  (one  of  many),  but  as  a  par- 
ticular friend.  It  was  several  years,  however, 
before  the  idea  of  his  having  a  library  there 
took  shape. 

The  project  was  treated  at  first  with  an  air 
of  frank  pleasantry.  Miller  did  not,  I  believe, 
quite  grasp  the  fact  that  these  people  who 
could  jest  so  easily  about  putting  up  a  library 
for  him  were  quite  in  earnest.  At  the  same 
time  he  liked  to  hear  the  plan  discussed. 

We  who  heard  the  discussions  used  to  tell 
Mrs.  Cassedy  that  it  was  evident  she  was 
founding  an  asylum  for  geniuses,  a  la  Tanmias 
[69] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Haggart,  and  that  Miller  was  to  be  the  first 
inmate.  She  would  laugh  merrily  and  reply 
that  at  all  events  her  flock  of  geniuses  need 
have  no  fear  of  being  confined  under  one  roof; 
they  should  occupy  a  row  of  artistic  cottages, 
one  to  each,  along  the  highway  to  the  west  of 
the  main  building,  and  be  free  to  go  and  come 
at  their  pleasure. 

The  rapid  growth  of  the  school  compelled 
the  putting  up  of  new  buildings  or  the  recon- 
struction of  old  ones.  There  was  often  a  little 
army  of  workmen  in  the  field  through  the  sum- 
mer months,  and  it  was  a  comparatively  simple 
matter  in  Mr.  Gassedy's  opinion  to  run  up  one 
more  structure  of  moderate  size.  Miller  was 
lucky  in  having  a  patron  of  the  constructive 
turn  of  mind.  Gassedy's  associates  have  long 
known  him  for  a  man  to  whom  problems  in 
stone  and  timber,  in  plaster  and  paint,  offer  no 
terrors.  With  him  building  has  not  been  a 
discipline  but  rather  a  sport.  It  follows  from 
this,  as  well  as  from  his  affection  for  our  friend, 
[70] 


THE  LIBRARY 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

that  he  took  a  deep  personal  interest  in  the 
erection  of  the  *  Miller  Library.' 

The  work  was  completed  by  the  beginning 
of  winter,  1901,  and  Miller  gave  the  order  to 
have  all  his  belongings  shipped  by  freight  from 
Carmel.  On  a  day  in  late  January  the  first 
case  of  books  was  opened.  By  way  of  invest- 
ing the  affair  with  some  pomp  and  circum- 
stance three  of  us,  solemnly  and  simultaneously, 
put  a  hand  into  the  box,  drew  out  each  a  book, 
and  as  solemnly  placed  the  three  books  side  by 
side  on  a  shelf;  we  then  sent  word  to  Miller 
(who  was  at  that  time  lecturing  in  the  West), 
that  some  headway  had  been  made  in  the 
classification  of  the  library. 

He  took  formal  possession  in  May,  and  for 
the  next  ten  years  he  was  regularly  at  the 
Glen  during  that  month,  besides  making  shorter 
visits  at  irregular  intervals  through  the  year. 
He  became  a  factor  in  the  school  life,  was  in- 
vested with  the  office  of  chaplain,  conducted 
the  news-classes  from  time  to  time,  made  an 
[71] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

admirable  patron  saint  to  the  club  which  had 
chosen  him  for  an  honorary  member,  and 
proved  himself  everybody's  friend. 

In  describing  the  Library  one  finds  oneself 
instinctively  using  the  past  tense;  the  genius 
of  the  place  is  gone. 

The  first  floor  consisted  of  a  single  large 
room,  and  running  completely  around  it,  a 
gallery  reached  by  a  stairway  immediately  at 
the  right  as  one  entered.  At  one  end  of  the 
room  was  a  fire-place  in  rough  stone  flanked 
by  settles.  At  the  opposite  end,  near  an  im- 
mense window  opening  down  the  Glen,  stood 
the  writing-desk  and  a  homely  cane-seated 
revolving-chair.  The  desk  was  a  long,  nar- 
row, old-fashioned  contrivance,  with  shallow 
drawers,  a  sloping  top  that  could  be  lifted, 
and  a  small  horizontal  space  at  each  end  for 
the  accommodation  of  ink-bottles  and  paste- 
pots.  When  there  was  nothing  on  it  but  a  pad 
of  paper  and  a  dozen  envelopes  it  might  have 
been  accounted  a  fairly  roomy  desk.  One 
[72] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

might  depend,  however,  on  its  being  covered 
with  everything  it  could  be  made  to  hold. 

The  truth  is  that  this  desk,  to  which  Miller 
clung  as  tenaciously  as  to  his  old  experienced 
working-coat,  held  about  one  quarter  of  the 
stuff  he  wanted  within  reach  when  he  was  at 
work.  To  meet  his  further  needs  he  had  a  nest 
of  little  tables  (with  preposterously  long  legs), 
two  or  three  of  which  were  always  gathered 
about  him,  and  piled  high  with  pamphlets, 
journals,  letters,  bundles  of  clippings,  and 
what  not.  The  frail  httle  tables  fairly  stag- 
gered under  the  weight  imposed  on  them. 
Now  and  then  one  sunk  to  the  floor  from  sheer 
exhaustion,  and  then  must  the  help  of  Miller's 
mechanical  friend,  Jeremiah  Blackburne,  be 
called  in  to  repair  the  damage. 

Every  inch  of  wall-space  in  the  room  was 
shelved  and  crowded  with  books.  A  wide  open- 
ing opposite  the  main  entrance  led  to  a  second 
and  even  more  attractive  room,  also  shelved  to 
its  capacity,  galleried  like  the  first,  and  pro- 
[73] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

vided  with  a  sky-light.  In  this  room  was  a 
library-table  of  such  noble  dimensions  that 
four  authors  could  have  done  their  work  on  it 
simultaneously  without  quarreling  overmuch. 
In  addition  to  the  open  shelves  there  were  a 
half  dozen  cases  with  glass  doors  in  which  our 
collector  kept  many  of  his  finer  and  rarer  vol- 
umes. And  chairs  of  course,  easy  and  other- 
wise, in  great  profusion.  They  served  to  sit  on, 
put  books  in,  or  to  fall  over.  When  Miller  was 
left  alone  for  half  a  day  he  filled  every  chair  in 
the  room,  save  one,  with  books;  and  the  place 
never  looked  more  attractive  than  it  did  at 
these  times,  with  evidences  on  every  side  that 
he  was  grappling  with  his  library. 

On  the  posts  that  supported  the  gallery  in 
the  main  room  and  on  the  gallery  rail  itself, 
hung  a  number  of  portraits,  a  few  of  them 
framed  up  with  autograph  letters.  Statesmen, 
soldiers,  men  of  letters,  a  composer  of  popular 
songs,  a  philosopher,  and  a  group  of  personal 
friends  (some  of  them  life-sized  and  staring 
[74] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

prodigiously)  constituted  Dewitt  Miller's  art 
collection.  It  was  a  heterogeneous  assortment, 
but  then  — he  was  a  heterogeneous  person. 
And  if  it  pleased  him  to  hang  Charles  Eliot 
Norton  and  Dan  Emmett  in  close  proximity 
there  is  no  good  reason  why  he  should  not  have 
had  his  way. 

One  sometimes  paid  dearly  for  the  privilege 
of  having  one's  face  in  a  frame  in  the  Library. 
There  was  no  limit  to  Miller's  inventiveness 
when  the  mood  for  banter  was  on  him.  When 
the  glass  that  covered  one  of  these  photographs 
became  broken  he  declined  to  have  it  replaced, 
on  the  ground  that  it  would  almost  immedi- 
ately crack  again.  It  must  not  be  supposed 
that  he  put  the  idea  in  so  bald  a  form.  He  was 
polysyllabic,  allusive,  and  alliterative.  His 
statement  of  the  case  drew  a  shout  of  laughter 
from  every  one  present,  including  the  victim. 
Lest  any  blame  should  attach  to  himself  from 
the  broken  glass  on  the  score  of  indifferent 
house-keeping,  he  wrote  on  a  card  the  sub- 
[75] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

stance  of  what  he  had  just  said  and  stuck  the 
card  in  the  glass ;  it  remained  there  for  months. 
Hanging  from  the  gallery-rail  near  the  fire- 
place was  an  object  that  seemed  out  of  keeping 
with  its  bookish  surroundings,  namely  a  huge 
wasps'  nest,  doubtless  a  survival  from  boy- 
hood days,  a  reminder  of  the  period  of  our 
friend's  earliest  collecting.  Miller  was  very 
fond  of  it.  Some  one  had  told  him  of  John 
Josselyn,  the  early  New  England  tourist,  and 
his  misadventure;  who,  walking  in  the  woods, 

*  chanced  to  spy  a  fruit,  as  I  thought,  like  a 

*  pine-apple  plated  with  scales.  I  made  bold  to 
*step  unto  it,  with  an  intent  to  have  gathered 
*it.  .  .  .  By  the  time  I  was  come  into  the  house 
Hhey  hardly  knew  me  but  by  my  garments.' 
Miller  had  this  passage  printed  in  boldfaced 
type  and  tacked  up  under  his  beloved  wasps' 
nest. 

From  the  gallery  of  the  main  room  a  narrow 
staircase  led  to  the  second  floor.  When  I  say 
*a  narrow  staircase'  I  do  not  mean  that  it  was 
[76] 


^ 


THE  LIBRARY 

Main  Room 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

not  wide  enough  to  serve  its  purpose.  But 
Miller  insisted  on  putting  book-shelves  along 
its  entire  length,  and  as  a  result  he  had  almost 
to  go  up  and  down  sideways.  He  has  been 
known  to  rub  off  books  as  he  descended  in 
haste  from  the  upper  regions. 

On  the  second  floor  were  his  bed-room  and 
guest-chamber,  a  comfortably  large  hall,  and  a 
spacious  covered  veranda.  In  the  hall  he  kept 
a  big  cedar  chest  filled  with  the  sartorial  accu- 
mulations of  years.  He  had  in  full  measure  the 
bachelor's  helplessness  with  respect  to  the  care 
of  bodily  raiment.  His  clothes  were  made  of 
the  best  and  strongest  materials,  the  seams 
welded  rather  than  sewn.  He  never  absolutely 
wore  a  suit  out,  and  he  lacked  the  courage  to 
throw  it  away  when  it  was  no  longer  in  the 
mode.  Hence  the  plethoric  state  of  the  cedar 
chest. 

No  pleasanter  sight  was  to  be  met  with  on  a 
May  morning  than  Dewitt  Miller  beating  up 
the  contents  of  the  cedar  chest  for  moths.  He 
[77] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

did  it  with  an  energy  akin  to  that  he  displayed 
in  lecturing  on  'Our  Country's  Possibilities 
and  Perils.'  I  think  it  was  a  real  relief  to  him 
when  he  found  that  in  bestowing  of  his  abun- 
dance on  the  negro  workmen  about  the  place 
he  could  do  a  deed  of  genuine  kindness  and 
himself  lead  the  simpler  life.  But  the  facts 
had  to  be  clearly  laid  before  him. 

Parallel  with  the  hall  and  of  equal  length  ran 
the  great  covered  veranda,  and  this  he  turned 
into  a  sleeping-room.  Only  last  May  he  was 
busy  superintending  the  putting  up  of  screens 
to  keep  out  the  'matutinal  fly.' 

The  walls  of  the  hall  were  coated  on  both 
sides  with  books,  and  there  were  shelves  in 
each  of  the  bed-rooms.  On  first  taking  posses- 
sion of  the  Library,  Miller  had  placed  several 
heavy  cases  in  his  own  room  next  the  partition, 
and  filled  them  with  his  rarest  books.  He  had 
an  idea  that  the  air  was  dryer  up  there,  and 
that  it  was  in  all  ways  a  better  place  for  the 
*  nuggets'  than  on  the  ground  level.  Under 
[78] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

the  weight  of  the  cases  the  bed-room  floor 
began  Httle  by  Httle  to  sink,  and  kept  on  sink- 
ing until  Miller  feared  that  he  might  be  in  the 
plight  of  the  man  in  the  *  Purple  Cow'  book. 
That  worthy  had  walls  and  a  ceiling  but  no 
place  to  put  his  feet,  and  used  to  spring  from 
the  bed  to  the  dresser,  and  from  the  dresser  to 
the  door. 

When  the  lord  of  the  manor  was  summoned 
to  look  at  the  damage  that  was  being  done  he 
made  no  comment  on  the  behavior  of  the  floor, 
but  remarked  dryly  that  *it  was  a  pretty  good 
partition  that  would  stand  without  visible 
means  of  support.'  The  heavy  book-cases 
were  removed  and  there  was  no  further  set- 
tling. Miller  even  thought  that  the  floor  and 
the  partition  showed  a  tendency  to  reunite  — 
which  shows  what  an  essentially  optimistic 
nature  he  had. 

Getting  the  books  arranged  in  some  sem- 
blance of  order  proved  a  long  task,  but  at  the 
same  time  an  amusing  and  instructive  one. 
[79] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Miller  learned  many  things  about  his  posses- 
sions in  the  mere  act  of  transporting  them  up- 
stairs and  downstairs,  or  from  one  side  of  the 
great  room  to  the  other  side.  He  was  glad  to 
delegate  a  part  of  the  work  as  he  afterward  had 
a  chance  to  do.  The  classes  in  library-science 
were  held  in  his  building,  much  to  his  satisfac- 
tion, and  the  teacher  in  charge.  Miss  Freebey, 
took  a  more  than  common  interest  in  the  wel- 
fare of  the  books,  and  came  in  time  to  be  spo- 
ken of  as  the  librarian.  Miller  freely  lent  his 
volumes  and  had  no  concern  for  the  length  of 
time  they  stayed  away,  but  was  human  enough 
to  desire  that  they  be  brought  back  *  on  or  before 
*the  morning  of  the  Great  Assizes.'  The  jeal- 
ous care  shown  for  the  safety  of  his  treasures 
in  his  absence  gratified  him.  He  said  gleefully 
of  his  librarian,  *I  can  always  be  sure  of  one 
thing  —  if  she  lends  three  books  she  will  exact 
four  in  return.' 


VII 

To  give  an  adequate  account  of  Miller's 
books  is  work  for  the  professed  bibliographer, 
and  in  the  following  paragraphs  one  can  do  no 
more  than  throw  out  a  few  hints  as  to  the  sort 
of  thing  he  liked  to  buy.  It  must  be  kept  in 
mind  that  he  belonged  to  the  race  of  *  collectors 
omnivorous,'  and  was  only  prevented  by  lack 
of  money  from  devouring  the  contents  of  whole 
book-shops  at  a  meal. 

For  books  of  reference  of  all  kinds  he  had  a 
veritable  passion.  Encyclopaedias  were  his  j  oy , 
and  the  man  who  could  get  more  comfort  out 
of  the  Dictionary  of  National  Biography  than 
Miller,  has  yet  to  be  found.  The  acquisition 
of  a  fat,  double-columned,  closely-printed, 
newly-revised  and  greatly-augmented  com- 
pendium of  knowledge  —  any  kind  of  know- 
ledge —  gave  him  intense  delight.  He  bought 
dictionaries  of  art,  architecture,  engineering, 
[81] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

music,  medicine,  furniture,  classical  antiqui- 
ties, not  because  it  is  proper  to  buy  them  but 
because  he  had  a  craving  for  them.  He  packed 
his  shelves  with  handbooks  of  proverbs  and 
wise  sayings,  of  superstitions,  of  characters  of 
fiction,  of  last  words  of  famous  (or  infamous) 
men,  of  all  the  odds  and  ends  that  have  been 
partially  classified  and  wholly  alphabetized. 

He  found  Dictionaries  of  the  English  lan- 
guage irresistible,  and  was  in  a  way  to  collect 
them  all,  from  the  earliest  and  most  unscien- 
tific glossary  down  to  the  great  Oxford  Dic- 
tionary, now  in  course  of  publication.  Had  he 
been  one  of  the  original  projectors  of  James 
Murray's  monumental  work  he  could  hardly 
have  shown  more  enthusiasm  as  the  successive 
volumes  made  their  appearance.  Small  dic- 
tionaries he  bought  much  as  a  man  might  buy 
grapes  —  by  the  bunch.  Any  word-book  that 
came  recommended  by  a  scholarly  name  and  a 
new  treatment  of  the  old  material  was  certain 
to  be  added  to  his  stock.  He  liked  the  manuals 
[82] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

that  are  ostensibly  compiled  for  printers,  and 
which  prove  so  helpful  to  the  rest  of  the  world. 
One  of  his  latest  loves  was  the  Authors'  and 
Printers'  Dictionary  by  F.  H.  Collins,  a  genuine 
thesaurus,  by  the  way.  He  must  have  pur- 
chased twenty-five  copies,  for  himself  and  his 
friends. 

For  books  about  books,  general  and  special 
bibliographies,  sale-catalogues  and  all  other 
catalogues  whatsoever,  he  had  a  collector's 
natural  fondness.  His  imperfect  knowledge  of 
French  cut  him  off  from  much  that  he  would 
have  found  useful  in  this  direction.  Perhaps  it 
is  well  that  he  did  not  conceive  a  passion  for 
original  editions  of  the  Romantics;  he  would 
have  found  it  costly.  The  books  of  Peacock, 
Borrow,  Henry  Taylor,  and  Edward  FitzGerald 
seem  more  in  keeping  with  his  own  tastes. 

In  looking  over  the  shelves  devoted  to  Eng- 
lish history  one  might  expect  to  find  most  of 
the  works  that  a  gentleman  ought  to  have. 
Yet  here  as  elsewhere  he  was  governed  in  his 
[83] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

collecting  by  his  personal  preferences.  He 
must,  for  example,  have  everything  that  came 
from  the  pen  of  E.  A.  Freeman,  or  of  Goldwin 
Smith,  and  the  unimportant  fact  that  he  al- 
ready owned  two  copies  of  a  given  book  was 
not  allowed  to  stand  in  the  way  of  his  buying 
two  more.  Of  biographies  of  English  states- 
men he  had  an  abundance;  biography  in  gen- 
eral was  one  of  his  hobbies. 

He  seemed  more  eager  to  collect  editions  of 
Thackeray  than  of  Dickens,  TroUope,  Reade, 
*  George  Eliot,'  or  the  Brontes.  One  did  well, 
however,  not  to  criticise  him  for  the  meagre- 
ness  of  the  show  of  books  by  a  given  author;  it 
might  turn  out  that  the  few  he  owned  were 
presentation  copies  of  no  little  value. 

Passing  over  the  modern  poets  and  essay- 
ists, who  were  well  represented,  one  must  note 
Miller's  great  interest  in  Doctor  Johnson  and 
those  about  him.  My  impression  is  that  he 
owned  all  the  editions  of  Boswell,  from  the 
first  two  volume  quarto  to  the  last  little  pocket 
[84] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

edition  printed  on  India  paper.  All  the  other 
lives,  recollections,  and  estimates  were  on 
his  shelves  —  Hawkins,  Piozzi,  Tyers,  every 
catchpenny  sketch  or  satirical  squib,  to- 
gether with  the  considerable  library  of  modern 
contributions  to  Johnsonian  literature. 

Were  the  booksellers  about  the  country  to 
be  questioned  as  to  Miller's  preferences  they 
would  probably  say  that  he  cared  most  for  a 
book  that  gave  proof  of  having  once  been  in 
its  author's  possession,  the  man's  own  copy 
with  corrections  by  his  hand,  or  a  copy  that 
he  had  given  a  friend  and  inscribed  with  a 
characteristic  sentiment.  The  Library  con- 
tained an  uncommon  number  of  j  ust  such  agree- 
able items,  and  were  a  little  descriptive  cata- 
logue to  be  made  of  them  it  could  hardly  be 
other  than  pleasant  reading.  Miller  certainly 
looked  upon  these  as  the  best  feature  of  his 
collection. 

He  enjoyed  giving  distinction  to  a  book  by 
some  touch  of  his  own,  as  when  he  had  a  rose, 
[85] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

plucked  from  FitzGerald's  grave  ('by  my 
friend  Mr.  Loder,  stationer  of  Woodbridge,  in 
my  presence'),  mounted  in  a  panel  and  bound 
into  an  early  (perhaps  the  first)  edition  of  the 
Rubdiydt.  Here  is  another  illustration  of  what 
he  liked  to  do :  A  certain  publisher  brought  out 
an  unauthorized  edition  of  an  early  work  by  a 
celebrated  American  writer,  now  dead.  The 
literary  executor  protested  in  terms  that  no 
pirate  of  sensitive  disposition  could  enjoy  read- 
ing. But  Miller  was  sure  that  the  legal  pub- 
lishers (who  also  published  for  the  executor) 
had  been  selling  copies  of  that  identical  work 
within  the  twelvemonth.  He  forwarded  copies 
of  both  the  authorized  and  the  unauthorized 
edition  to  the  editorial  department  of  the  house 
begging  for  an  explanation.  And  the  editorial 
department  was  so  good-natured  as  to  write 
on  a  fly-leaf  of  their  edition  a  full  account  of 
the  affair.  It  was  a  very  singular  story,  and  of 
no  interest  whatever  except  to  book-collectors. 
One  is  puzzled  to  know  how  to  give  an  ac- 
[86] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

count  of  our  friend's  reading.  He  was  con- 
stantly surprising  us  by  revealing  an  acquaint- 
ance with  some  author  we  should  have  said  he 
had  never  looked  into.  One  afternoon  in  the 
Library  I  picked  up  his  copy  of  Sadducismus 
Triumphatus  and  fell  to  reading  here  and 
there.  Presently  I  read  aloud  a  paragraph  and 
asked  him  if  it  were  not  remarkably  good  writ- 
ing, supposing  that  he  would  at  once  inquire 
what  book  I  had.  But  without  looking  up 
from  the  newspaper  he  was  clipping  Miller 
replied,  *0h,  capital  writer,  capital!  There 
aren't  many  men  more  vigorous  than  Joe 
Glanvil.' 

It  may  have  been  a  mere  coincidence.  Pos- 
sibly he  knew  that  one  striking  paragraph 
from  *Joe  Glanvil'  better  than  he  knew  the 
volume  as  a  whole.  On  the  other  hand  these 
coincidences  were  forever  occurring;  he  must 
have  read  in  a  great  many  books,  and  perse- 
vered to  the  end  of  not  a  few.  His  faculty  for 
getting  always  at  the  core  of  a  book  stood  him 
[87] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

in  good  stead.  He  divined  the  exact  location 
of  what  he  wanted  while  another  might  have 
blundered  about  in  search  of  it. 

One  may  safely  say  that  he  preferred  biogra- 
phies, memoirs,  table-talk,  and  collections  of 
letters  to  every  other  form  of  literature,  as- 
suming him  to  be  reading  for  pure  intellectual 
pleasure.  Pepys,  Gibbon,  Hume  (in  his  corre- 
spondence), Madame  D'Arblay,  Lady  Mary 
Wortley  Montagu,  Horace  Walpole,  Chester- 
field, Gray,  Kirkpatrick  Sharpe,  Byron  the  let- 
ter-writer, — he  delighted  in  them  all,  and  in 
the  modern  examples  of  epistolary  and  biogra- 
phical art  hardly  less  than  in  the  earlier  ones. 

I  think  of  him  as  having  done  his  heroic 
reading  between  the  ages  of  seventeen  and 
thirty,  or  thereabouts,  and  as  having  read  on 
a  greater  variety  of  subjects  after  he  became 
a  confirmed  book-collector,  but  with  less  at- 
tention to  each.  There  are  good  reasons  for 
holding  this  view  and  none  for  holding  it  too 
rigidly.  Miller  was  capable  at  any  moment  of 
[  88  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

grappling  with  a  heavy  book  on  socialism  or 
psychology,  let  us  say,  and  of  hanging  on  until 
he  had  mastered  what  it  had  to  give. 

And  lastly,  he  was  so  constituted  that  his 
hearty  admiration  of  Culture  and  Anarchy, 
Studies  in  the  Renaissance,  and  The  Torch  did 
not  in  the  least  interfere  with  his  enjoyment  of 
the  Rhymes  of  Ironquill  and  the  lucubrations 
of  *Abe  Martin.'  To  be  so  open-minded  and 
friendly  towards  both  men  and  books  as  was 
Dewitt  Miller  is  to  have  inexhaustible  sources 
of  happiness  at  one's  command. 


VIII 

His  ordinary  talk  was  much  like  his  public 
discourse,  but  far  richer  and  more  varied,  well 
worth  any  listener's  while,  even  the  most  culti- 
vated. They  who  have  heard  *The  Uses  of 
Ugliness'  and  'The  Stranger  at  Our  Gates' 
know  something  of  Dewitt  Miller;  they  alone 
have  a  right  idea  of  his  amazing  mental  act- 
ivity and  his  wide  knowledge  of  men  and 
events  whose  privilege  it  has  been  to  listen  to 
him  when  he  was  not  only  in  the  mood  to  talk, 
but  also  in  the  mood  to  settle  himself  down  and 
*have  his  talk  out.' 

We  who  were  often  with  him  believed  that  he 
spoke  remarkably  good  English.  But  were  we 
competent  to  pronounce  on  the  question?  Did 
not  Fitzedward  Hall  drop  a  hint  to  the  effect 
that  Americans  could  hardly  be  expected  to 
know  real  English  for  the  simple  reason  that 
they  abnost  never  had  a  chance  to  hear  it 
[90] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

spoken?  And  did  he  not  also  say  (or  imply) 
that  an  American's  only  hope  of  learning  to 
speak  the  language  himself  lay  in  his  taking  up 
residence  in  England,  and  there  devoting  him- 
self to  listening  with  both  ears  and  watching 
every  sentence  that  he  uttered? 

Something  like  that  I  seem  to  have  read 
somewhere  in  Fitzedward  Hall's  books,  —  all 
of  which,  by  the  way,  Miller  bought,  read  in  a 
little,  and  regularly  quoted.  With  what  hu- 
morous unction  would  he  roll  out  the  following 
sentence,  in  which  the  angry  philologer  berates 
another  philologer:  *  There  is  one  of  their  num- 
*ber,  however,  a  wholesale  sponsor,  and  also 
'an  originator,  of  superficial  conceits,  whose 
*clientry  of  clapper-clawers,  misrepresenting 
*the  character  of  my  strictures,  and,  fathering 
*on  me,  with  frontless  mendacity,  the  most 

*  preposterous  principles,  have,  in  requital, 

*  shown  themselves,  as  an  old  author  phrases  it, 
'valiantly  railipotent.' 

I  can  still  hear  the  cadence  of  Miller's  voice 
[91  ] 


DEWITT    MILLER 

as  he  chanted  the  words  '  vaUantly  raUipotent,* 
giving  every  syllable  its  full  value,  and  the 
gurgle  of  laughter  with  which  he  followed  the 
quotation,  and  the  large  patter  of  his  steps  as 
he  ran  to  put  the  book  away,  and  his  ejacu- 
lation of  'Very  entertaining  old  gentleman, 
Fitzedward  Hall,  very!' 

Two  of  Miller's  friends  were  speaking  of  his 
charm  as  a  converser  (he  had  that  moment 
left  them),  and  they  remarked  that  if  he  lived 
to  be  seventy-five  or  eighty  as  he  seemed 
likely  to  do,  and  retained  all  his  powers,  the 
young  men  who  heard  him  in  his  old  age  would 
probably  say  to  one  another  that  that  must 
have  been  the  way  in  which  all  cultivated  gen- 
tlemen used  to  talk  in  the  Nineties  and  the 
early  Nineteen  hundreds ;  and  they  would  per- 
haps lament  the  decay  of  the  art  of  conversa- 
tion, and  have  a  sentimental  word  to  say  about 
the  good  old  times.  Now  the  truth  is  that  De- 
witt  Miller  stood  almost  in  a  class  by  himself. 
One  does  not  often  meet  with  men  so  fertile  in 
I  92  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

ideas  and  so  affluent  of  speech  as  was  he.  A 
typical  American  through  and  through,  he 
seemed  to  belong  to  an  earlier  age  and  an  older 
country.  He  might  have  lived  at  Halliford  on 
the  Thames,  and  been  intimate  with  Thomas 
Love  Peacock.  The  author  of  Crotchet  Castle 
would  have  liked  Miller,  I  firmly  believe,  liked 
him  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  his  Greek  was  par- 
ticularly small. 

To  account  for  the  extraordinary  power  our 
friend  displayed  in  talk  is  no  easy  matter.  I 
have  heard  a  critic  who  never  uses  the  word 
lightly  say,  'Genius,  and  nothing  less.'  That 
may  be  all  there  was  of  it.  The  man  had  an 
indubitable  gift,  one  of  the  sort  that  Nature 
bestows  at  random,  not  even  looking  to  see 
into  whose  keeping  it  falls. 

That  he  did  not  trust  to  his  gift  alone  but 
always  took  pains  was  evident  to  the  most  care- 
less observer.  When  it  came  his  turn  to  move 
in  the  conversational  game  he  almost  never 
moved  at  once.  You  could  see  that  he  was  re- 
[93  1 


DEWITT  MILLER 

volving  the  subject  in  his  mind,  looking  on  all 
sides  of  it,  or  if  not  all,  on  as  many  as  he  thought 
needful  for  his  purpose.  Owing  to  the  great 
rapidity  with  which  his  mind  worked  you  never 
had  to  wait  long,  but  you  waited,  nevertheless, 
until  he  was  quite  ready  to  speak.  The  pro- 
cess was  the  same  even  when  it  was  a  ques- 
tion of  repartee,  a  game  at  which  he  was  amaz- 
ingly quick  and  brilliant;  he  took  his  time  to 
prepare, — an  infinitesimal  amount,  to  be  sure, 
but  enough. 

To  his  habit  of  taking  pains  may  be  referred 
the  clarity  of  his  ideas  and  the  freshness  and 
vigor  of  his  diction.  He  was  never  slovenly  in 
his  thinking  or  careless  in  his  choice  of  terms. 
He  never  maundered.  Rather  than  utter 
nothings  in  an  aimless  way  (what  he  always 
described  as  *  chortling'),  he  would  keep  per- 
fectly still. 

The  large  words  that  he  affected  became  him 
as  they  might  not  have  become  many  another 
talker.  Print  the  sentence  as  he  uttered  it  and 
[  94] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

its  peculiar  effectiveness  in  point  of  diction 
would  be  quite  lost.  The  presence  of  the  man, 
the  tones  of  his  voice,  the  facial  expression, 
all  the  elements  that  go  to  make  the  orator  and 
the  table-talker  must  be  taken  into  account. 
And  it  is  well  to  bear  in  mind  that  Miller  often 
used  polysyllabic  words  with  a  humorous  or  an 
ironical  intent. 

He  was  no  tyrant  in  talk  but  a  man  who 
could  listen  to  others  patiently  and  apprecia- 
tively, and  for  any  length  of  time.  Never  was 
he  known  to  give  signs  of  uneasiness  because 
the  leadership  had  not  been  handed  over  to 
him.  He  was  incapable  of  that  degree  of  ego- 
tism. If  one  of  his  long  silences  prompted 
the  question,  'Why  don't  you  say  something, 
Jahu?'  the  response  would  be,  *  I  am  listening, 
I  am  listening  —  and  enjoying.' 

And  so  he  was ;  but  whether  he  was  enjoying 
what  was  said,  or  the  lame  efforts  of  the  speak- 
ers to  say  something,  did  not  always  appear. 
At  times  he  carried  an  inscrutable  countenance. 
[95] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Though  he  never  consciously  aimed  at  deliv- 
ering a  monologue  he  understood  that  difficult 
art,  and  practised  it  in  places  where  he  felt  at 
liberty  to  do  so.  One  heard  him  at  his  best 
when  he  held  the  centre  of  the  stage  and  had 
become  completely  absorbed  in  the  theme.  It 
was  pleasant,  too,  after  he  had  maintained  a 
paradox  with  large  and  flowing  speech  and  a 
wealth  of  argument,  to  hear  the  scoffer's  'Well, 
you  have  at  least  got  it  out  of  your  system, 
Jahu,'  and  then  his  almost  liturgical  *Verily, 
verily,  animam  liberaviJ 

He  was  never  overbearing  in  conversation 
though  often  overpowering.  The  fault  lay  in 
his  bringing  to  many  a  subject  more  mind  than 
the  subject  deserved.  Where  the  conversation 
lay  between  three  or  four,  no  one  suffered ;  each 
did  his  share  in  bearing  the  burden  of  so  ex- 
haustive a  treatment.  But  when  the  party  con- 
sisted of  Miller  and  one  other,  that  one  other 
had  in  general  no  resource  but  to  sink  back  in 
his  chair  and  let  the  billows  of  mingled  sound 
[96] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

and  sense  roll  over  him.  Had  he  been  in  any 
real  danger  of  drowning,  Miller  himself  would 
have  been  the  first  to  perceive  it. 

In  argument  he  was  ingenious  and  usually 
sound,  though  he  loved  now  and  then  to  sup- 
port a  fantastical  opinion.  He  enjoyed  buf- 
feting an  adversary.  But  so  good-natured  was 
he  that  his  hardest  blows  left  the  effect  of 
having  been  delivered  with  a  very  soft  boxing- 
glove;  one  might  be  disconcerted,  as  well  as 
red  in  the  face,  but  was  otherwise  none  the 
worse  for  having  been  struck.  Miller  never 
shouted  an  adversary  down.  If,  however,  he 
felt  that  the  need  for  vocal  energy  existed  he 
would  *  sound  his  barbaric  yawp  over  the  roofs 
*of  the  world,'  and  rejoice  in  so  doing.  Ebulli- 
tions of  this  sort  took  place  only  among  his 
intimates  and  were  partly  due  to  mere  animal 
spirits. 

While  there  were  many  topics  on  which  he 
had  little  or  nothing  to  say  his  range  was  by  no 
means  narrow.  He  talked  remarkably  well  on 
[97] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

politics  and  American  political  history.  But 
one  can  see  now  that  the  parts  of  the  history 
for  which  he  greatly  cared  were  those  contem- 
poraneous with  his  own  life,  or  very  nearly  so. 
One  never  heard  him  expatiate  on  the  Revolu- 
tion, or  the  War  of  1812,  or  the  growth  of  the 
*  American  system,'  or  the  struggle  between 
Jackson  and  South  Carolina;  it  was  when  he 
reached  the  period  of  the  Lincoln-Douglas 
debates  that  he  became  copious. 

Albeit  he  was  only  a  boy  when  the  Civil  War 
ended,  his  knowledge  of  the  causes  leading  up 
to  the  great  struggle,  and  of  the  men  who  were 
foremost  in  the  government  during  the  years 
of  its  prosecution,  was  full  and  gave  every  sign 
of  being  exact.  So  vivid  were  the  pictures  he 
drew  that  he  seemed  at  times  to  be  speaking  as 
an  eye-witness.  A  listener  unacquainted  with 
his  real  age  would  have  said  that  Miller  had 
undoubtedly  heard  many  an  exciting  debate 
and  been  present  at  many  a  turbulent  political 
gathering  between  1857  and  1865. 
[98] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

His  command  of  mere  names  and  dates  was 
astonishing,  and  to  loose  talkers,  annoying. 
Conscious  of  being  in  the  right,  opposition 
made  him  positive,  even  superiatively  positive. 
Then  would  he  roll  his  head  from  side  to  side 
as  he  talked,  and  emphasize  his  statements  by 
slapping  softly  and  repeatedly  on  the  table 
with  the  flat  of  his  large  white  hands. 

Of  late  years  his  talk  ran  less  on  modem 
English  political  history  than  it  once  did.  His 
strength  there  lay  in  a  broad  knowledge  of  the 
events  that  touched,  however  remotely,  the 
careers  of  Disraeli  and  Gladstone.  Not  a  book, 
or  pamphlet,  or  leading  article  that  concerned 
either  of  these  two  escaped  his  eye.  But  when 
Gladstone  died  our  friend's  interest  in  English 
politics  rather  declined. 

It  is  a  singular  fact  that  this  passionate  col- 
lector was  at  heart  far  more  curious  about  hu- 
manity than  about  printed  paper,  and  would 
anytime  throw  aside  a  book  to  talk  with  a  man. 
He  had  met  so  many  people  of  varying  degrees 
[  99  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

of  celebrity,  and  so  many  people  *who  had  no 
name  at  all '  but  were  none  the  less  interesting 
on  that  account,  that  he  was  often  at  his  best 
when  human  nature,  exemplified  in  any  one  of 
several  hundred  men  and  women,  w^as  his 
theme. 

Progressive  movements  in  the  scientific,  the 
social,  and  the  ecclesiastical  worlds  always  at- 
tracted him;  he  talked  well  on  many  a  topic 
of  that  sort.  His  knowledge  of  medicine  and 
surgery  was  excellent  for  an  amateur,  and  if  he 
spoke,  as  he  often  did,  of  psycho-therapeutics, 
he  could  be  depended  on  to  discourse  in  a  way 
that  was  certainly  entertaining  and  possibly 
instructive.  A  man  who  heard  Doctor  Holmes 
talk  on  only  one  occasion  remarked  that  his 
conversation,  though  witty,  contained  *too 
great  an  infusion  of  physiological  and  medical 
metaphor.'  One  sometimes  remembered  this 
criticism  when  Dewitt  Miller  was  speaking. 

He  gave,  as  a  matter  of  course,  no  end  of 
proofs  that  he  had  read  his  theological  books, 
[  100] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

and  his  knowledge  of  the  English  Bible  must 
have  been  unusual  if  one  may  judge  of  it  by 
the  immense  number  of  quotations  and  allu- 
sions one  heard  him  make. 

In  a  word,  he  had  stored  up  a  deal  of  mis- 
cellaneous information  on  a  great  variety  of 
topics,  more  perhaps  than  any  of  us  suspected ; 
and  without  the  least  pretence  to  omniscience 
he  made  a  free  use  of  the  store  in  his  common 
everyday  talk.  One  trait  illustrative  of  his 
habit  of  mind  stands  out  in  bold  relief  now. 
Miller  never  despised  the  seemingly  unrelated 
fact,  the  mere  scrap  of  information  that  re- 
sembled nothing  so  much  as  a  single  page  torn 
from  a  book.  His  avidity  for  these  waifs  and 
strays  frequently  moved  us  to  laughter,  as  if 
we  alone  were  grown  up  and  he  a  precocious 
school-boy,  cramming  the  pockets  of  his  round- 
about and  knickerbockers  with  all  manner  of 
odds  and  ends,  from  twine  to  jack-knives.  But 
we  were  not  so  wise  as  we  thought.  His  instinct 
v/as  sound.  The  unrelated  fact  presently 
[  101  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

ranged  itself,  was  drawn  to  other  facts  or  be- 
came the  centre  of  a  group  of  its  own,  and  when 
needed  in  conversation  could  be  brought  out 
and  used  with  telling  force.  The  sense  of  plea- 
surable surprise  that  one  experienced  while 
Dewitt  Miller  was  talking  may  be  referred  in 
large  degree  to  a  skillful  use  of  such  material. 
No  record  of  his  talk  exists,  and  therefore  no 
proof  can  be  given  that  he  was  as  many-sided 
and  as  brilliant  as  has  been  alleged.  We  who 
have  heard  him  (and  there  are  many  hundreds 
of  us)  are  firmly  convinced  of  his  ability.  We 
can  always  say,  one  to  another,  'You  have 
heard  him  too,  and  you  know.'  We  are  modest 
in  our  claims,  as  becomes  us  in  speaking  of  a 
man  who  always  placed  a  modest  estimate  on 
his  own  powers.  We  do  not  say  that  he  was  a 
*  great  converser,'  but  we  hold,  and  will  con- 
tinue to  hold,  to  the  belief  that  of  the  gifts 
essential  to  the  making  of  a  great  converser 
not  a  few  were  his. 


IX 

*This  is  not  a  record  office  for  his  sayings,' 
wrote  Thomas  Tyers  in  his  sketch  of  Johnson, 
and  then  gives  three  of  the  Doctor's  best.  One 
would  gladly  be  persuaded  that  three  of  De- 
witt  Miller's  wittiest  remarks  had  been  in- 
cluded among  the  eight  or  ten  that  follow. 
Unhappily  it  is  not  a  question  of  choosing  from 
many  good  things  in  the  hope  of  getting  at  the 
best,  but  of  setting  down  the  very  few  that 
cling  to  the  memory,  with  private  lamentations 
because  their  number  is  so  small. 

In  printing  these  few  one  runs  the  risk  of 
misrepresenting  their  author.  It  is  laying  more 
stress  on  them  than  was  meant  to  be  laid,  — 
as  if  one  were  to  frame  and  glaze  a  picture  that 
was  certainly  worth  keeping,  though  it  would 
better  have  been  pasted  in  a  scrap-book  than 
hung  on  the  wall.  Should  they  help  the  reader 
to  recall  other  sayings  of  his  and  thereby  help 
[103] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

in  some  degree  to  keep  fresh  and  vivid  the 
memory  of  his  cheerful  presence,  they  will  have 
served  a  purpose. 

There  was  a  certain  man,  commonly  spoken 
of  in  our  immediate  circle  as  the  Deacon,  with 
whom  Miller  had  business  relations  for  a  brief 
time.  He  dropped  a  remark  one  day  to  the 
effect  that  the  Deacon  was  anxious  not  alone 
for  his  worldly  advancement,  but  also  for  his 
spiritual  welfare.  A  bystander  exclaimed  scep- 
tically, 'Brother  X  does  n't  pray  with  you,  I 
hope.' 

*No,'  said  Miller.  *  Preys  upon  me.  Has 
his  choice  of  preposition.' 

Of  some  boastful  acquaintance  who  owned  a 
house,  and  labored  under  the  delusion  that  he 
also  owned  an  estate,  Miller  said,  with  a  grunt 
of  amusement,  'Why,  the  fellow's  plot  of 
ground  is  so  small  that  he  could  n't  put  his 
foot  out  of  doors  without  trespassing.' 

He  took  vast  delight  in  gibing  at  the  dimin- 
utive artificial  lake  much  'featured'  in  the 
[  104  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

advertisements  of  a  well-known  summer  resort 
among  the  hills  of  Maryland,  affirming,  for 
example,  that  *  a  man  fell  into  it  the  other  day 
and  soaked  it  all  up ;  then  he  looked  around  and 
wondered  how  in  the  world  he  came  to  get  wet.* 
Miller  saw  this  minute  body  of  water  annually, 
and  it  always  stimulated  his  invention. 

He  had  a  pleasant  way  of  giving  an  unex- 
pected turn  to  old  formulas  and  set  phrases. 
A  friend  sneezed  prodigiously  in  his  presence, 
and  instead  of  blessing  him  in  the  customary 
fashion  Miller  cried,  in  a  loud  and  joyous  voice, 
'God  bless  the  earth  and  the  fullness  thereof!* 
The  friend,  a  man  of  great  resources,  sneezed  a 
second  time,  and  louder  than  before.  Where- 
upon Miller  said  (smiling),  *I  '11  add  two 
planets.' 

When  told  of  the  extraordinary  richness  of  a 
tract  of  land  not  far  from  his  library  Miller's 
eyes  glittered  with  pleasure.  And  thinking  of 
his  favorite  vegetables  he  said  in  a  fervent 
tone,  *  I  wish  I  could  farm  it.  I  'd  raise  onions 
[  105] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

as  big  as  pumpkins,  and  pumpkins  as  big  as 
asteroids.' 

Walking  with  him  in  a  very  narrow  path 
I  remarked  that  if  we  were  to  meet  a  snake 
(for  such  creatures  were  often  seen  there),  we 
should  probably  both  jump.  'Jump!'  he  ex- 
claimed, with  a  grimace  of  comic  terror.  'Bet- 
ter than  that.  If  I  were  to  meet  a  snake  in 
this  path  I  should  instantly  solve  the  problem 
of  aerial  navigation.' 

So  forceful  was  his  utterance  at  this  moment, 
so  alert  his  look,  and  so  emphatic  his  gestures 
that  the  effect  was  irresistible.  He  stood  poised 
on  tip-toe,  arms  spread,  as  if  ready  to  start.  I 
could  almost  see  him  winging  his  way  through 
space. 

He  enjoyed  a  figure  of  speech  drawn  from 
the  flight  of  birds  and  once  entertained  the 
dinner-table  by  likening  himself  to  a  migratory 
duck,  honking  as  he  went,  flapping  his  wings, 
and  'beating  the  air  with  my  webb-ed  feet.' 
He  elaborated  the  conceit  with  a  wealth  of 
[  106  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

detail.  It  may  not  have  been  good  natural 
history  but  it  was  immense  fun. 

The  witty  turn  he  gave  many  an  idea  was 
due  merely  to  his  expressing  it  with  verbal 
neatness  and  throwing  it  into  high  relief  by 
spirited  exaggeration.  Here  is  an  illustration. 
A  fugitive  from  New  England  justice,  after 
hiding  for  two  or  three  years  in  the  Northwest, 
was  captured  and  brought  back  for  trial.  He 
is  said  to  have  told  the  officer  that  the  happiest 
moment  of  his  life  was  when  he  again  caught 
sight  of  the  dome  of  the  State  House.  'Cer- 
tainly,' said  Miller,  when  he  heard  the  anec- 
dote ;  *  the  true  Bostonian !  Better  to  be  in  j  ail 
in  Charlestown  than  free  on  the  Dakota  border.* 

He  was  never  happier  than  on  those  not  rare 
occasions  when  he  was  making  jests  about 
oneseK  to  oneself.  I  remember  showing  him  a 
ticket  issued  for  a  course  of  my  lectures  in  a 
little  Pennsylvania  town.  On  the  back  of  the 
ticket  the  local  druggist  had  advertised  his 
wares,  laying  marked  emphasis  on  the  soda- 
1107] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

fountain.  Having  examined  the  bit  of  paste- 
board carefully,  first  on  the  one  side  and  then 
on  the  other,  Miller  returned  it  with  the  remark 
*Two  kinds  of  fizz.' 

He  thought  me  inclined  at  times  to  be  over- 
critical  of  individual  members  of  our  circle.  (It 
is  perhaps  superfluous  to  point  out  that  he  was 
in  this  particular  wholly  mistaken.)  At  a  break- 
fast-party at  the  Glen  I  had  voiced  my  feeling 
in  terms  not  too  strong,  but  certainly  stronger 
than  he  himself  would  have  used.  There  fol- 
lowed a  brief  silence  while  he  loaded  his  gun  to 
deliver  this  shot:  'Leon  enjoys  only  one  thing 
more  than  damning  his  acquaintance,  and  that 
is,  damning  his  friends/ 

Yet  he  was  himself  an  adept  in  the  art  of 
chastising  those  he  loved,  and  he  frequently 
exercised  his  art.  Once  when  he  had  been 
tremendously  emphatic  over  the  conduct  of 
a  common  friend,  feeling  himself  aggrieved 
thereby,  Mrs.  Vincent  genially  remonstrated 
with,  'But,  Jahu,  our  hearts  are  loyal.' 
[  108  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

*Yes,*  he  retorted  with  great  energy,  *but 
our  intellects  are  free.' 

I  brought  him  the  important  news  that  one 
of  his  professional  coadjutors  had  declared 
publicly  that  for  his  part  he  stood  in  no  fear 
whatever  of  the  Day  of  Judgment.  *He  says 
that  out  of  pure  bravado,'  explained  Miller. 
*But  also  he  is  of  a  most  sanguine  tempera- 
ment; he  hopes  that  in  the  scramble  of  the 
resurrection  morning  he  can  get  away.' 

When  told  that  this  same  brother  of  the  plat- 
form, who  was  on  the  eve  of  sailing  for  Europe, 
would  share  a  stateroom  with  the  proprietor 
of  the  Eden  Mus6e,  Miller  said,  chuckling,  *  An 
exhibitor  of  curiosities  and  the  thing  itself!' 

Speaking  of  an  extraordinary  grouping  of 
books  that  had  met  his  eye.  Miller  observed, 
*The  next  time  I  visit  the  gentleman's  library 
I  shall  expect  to  find  In  a  Club  Corner  classified 
under  calisthenics.'  The  last  part  of  the  above 
sentence  is,  by  the  way,  a  good  example  of  our 
friend's  use  of  assonance  and  alUteration. 
[  109  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

The  question  came  up  as  to  whether  a  certain 
professor,  a  well-read  man  with  a  fairly  good 
voice  and  no  pretensions  to  beauty,  would 
make  a  better  appearance  on  the  platform  with, 
or  without,  his  eye-glasses.  Miller  promptly 
voted  for  his  retaining  them,  on  the  ground 
that  *They  make  an  important  feature  of 
the  scholastic  face-scape.'  But  it  was  finally 
decided  by  this  irreverent  self-appointed  com- 
mittee that  if  the  professor  were  to  ask  them 
what  he  had  better  do,  they  would  recommend 
as  delicately  as  possible  his  speaking  from 
behind  a  screen. 

Seeing  an  actor  walking  arm  in  arm  with  a 
minister.  Miller  characterized  the  situation  (to 
another  actor)  with  the  phrase,  *  Apotheosis  of 
the  stage  —  downfall  of  the  clergy.' 

The  advertising  cards  in  street-cars  and  else- 
where often  led  to  his  making  a  droll  remark, 
one  of  the  sort  that  pleases  for  the  moment  and 
is  expected  to  be,  and  generally  is,  forgotten  the 
next  moment.  *  A  cannibal  would  like  that,' 
[  110  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

he  said,  indicating  the  picture  of  a  very  plump, 
red-cheeked  little  girl,  supposed  to  have  been 
fattened  on  a  particular  brand  of  soup,  and 
beneath  the  picture  the  legend,  *Add  a  little 
hot  water  and  serve.'  And  again,  when  passing 
a  clothing-store  his  eye  caught  the  words 
*  Lazarus,  Spring  Suits,'  Miller  remarked  with 
a  smile,  *  Lazarus  is  properly  celebrating  his 
resurrection.' 

Having  undertaken,  four  or  five  years  ago, 
to  write  a  brief  sketch  of  him  for  a  paper  edited 
by  his  friend  Paul  Pearson,  a  paper  devoted  to 
the  interests  of  the  lecture-platform,  I  asked 
Miller  if  he  would  stand  by  what  I  said.  *  Yes,' 
he  replied  cheerfully,  *or  fall.' 

Very  little  of  this  sort  of  thing,  which  made 
ordinary  intercourse  with  him  so  entertaining, 
is  to  be  found  in  his  letters.  There  were  occa- 
sions, however,  which  moved  him  to  be  pointed, 
such  as  the  following:  — 

For  the  enlightenment  of  his  middle  age,  as  a 
novelist  phrases  it,  Dewitt  Miller  numbered 
[  111  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

among  the  rather  large  cu-cle  of  his  intimates  a 
few  who  aspired  to  authorship.  He  was  kept 
quite  busy  discipHning  them  from  time  to 
time.  That  his  enemy  had  published  a  book,  or 
any  number  of  books,  concerned  Miller  not  in 
the  least.  But  when  his  friend  published  one 
he  felt  the  opportunity  to  be  glorious.  It  was 
certainly  glorious  for  him.  He  had  *  laughter 
for  a  month,'  and  a  good  jest,  not  indeed  for- 
ever, but  quite  long  enough.  He  wrote  one 
literary  aspirant  who  had  recently  come  out  in 
print,  urging  him  to  bring  suit  without  delay 
against  a  certain  journal  noted  for  the  pun- 
gency of  its  criticisms;  there  had  indeed  been 
no  formal  review,  nor  was  likely  to  be,  but  the 
author  had  a  strong  case  for  all  that.  The  new 
volume  was  announced  under  the  heading, 
*Books  of  the  Weak.' 

The  saying  is  not  new,  but  the  variations  he 

contrived  to  play  on  the  idea  were,  and  their 

number  past  counting.  He  salved  the  wounds 

he  made  by  freely  buying  the  books,  and  by 

[  112] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

speaking  well  of  them  behind  the  author's 
back.  And  when  he  could  not  speak  well  he 
might  be  trusted  so  to  becloud  his  real  opinion 
with  large  words  and  syntactical  involutions 
that  it  was  as  good  as  a  compliment,  or  even 
better.  All  of  which  he  did  from  sheer  kind- 
ness of  heart. 

His  joy  knew  no  bounds  when  these  presen- 
tation copies  turned  up  again,  this  time  for 
sale.  He  gave  a  copy  of  a  harmless  essay  writ- 
ten by  one  of  his  friends  to  a  certain  lady- 
novelist,  having  written  therein  an  elaborate 
inscription  according  to  his  wont.  Some  weeks 
later  he  found  it  in  a  second-hand  book-shop 
and  promptly  bought  it.  The  book  was  placed 
among  his  treasures  and  decorated  with  a 
second  inscription  of  which  one  striking  phrase 
is,  *  Stale  bread  returning.' 

Since  it  was  his  fate  to  have  friends  who 
wrote  books.  Miller  was  blessed  in  their  disin- 
clination, or  their  inability,  to  write  much.  No 
one  of  them  has  ever  achieved  a  work  in  several 
[  113] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

volumes.  An  anecdote  was  told  in  his  presence 
of  a  voluminous  man  of  letters  who  had  sent  an 
entire  set  of  his  works  to  a  business  acquaint- 
ance, a  stationer,  and  had  not  heard  from  them 
yet,  though  many  months  had  passed.  Miller 
thought  it  not  difficult  to  divine  the  use  to 
which  the  books  had  been  put.  *  Nevertheless,' 
he  said,  *the  recipient  was  bound  to  make  an 
acknowledgment  in  one  form  or  another.  How 
would  this  do?  "Dear  Sir:  We  regret  that  the 
superintendent  at  the  paper-mill  should  have 
so  overlooked  his  obligation.  We  distinctly 
advised  him  to  acknowledge  the  waste  you 
sent.'" 

The  listeners  all  agreed  that  the  letter  would 
*do,'  and  such  of  them  as  were  authors  pri- 
vately rejoiced  that  they  had  never  published 
sets  of  books,  only  single  volumes,  and  those  at 
long  intervals. 

Miller's  fondness  for  quip  was  apparent 
from  many  of  his  inscriptions  in  books.  Here 
is  a  characteristic  example  of  his  skill  in 
[  114  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

mingling  praise  and  blame.  A  gentleman, 
noted  among  his  associates  for  an  extreme 
reluctance  to  take  pen  in  hand,  received  from 
Miller  one  Christmas  a  copy  of  FitzGerald's 

Letters,  in  which  was  written,  *To  H , 

these  models  of  a  form  of  literature  at  which 
his  own  presumptive  expertness  is  shamefully- 
defeated  by  a  total  lack  of  inclination.' 

The  following  sportive  inscription  was  writ- 
ten in  a  pocket-speller  which  he  had  bought 
to  meet  the  peculiar  need  of  three  of  us,  him- 
self and  two  other  notorious  ori:hographical 
sinners.  *For  the  use  of  F.  B.  W.,  who  has 
genius  but  who  can't  spell;  and  of  L.  H.  V., 
who  certainly  has  talent  and  possibly  genius, 
but  who  can't  spell,  and  of  J.  D.  M.,  who  has 
neither  talent  nor  genius,  but  who  can  spell 
better  than  either  of  the  above — and  yet  can't 
spell.' 

For  a  last  illustration  —  this  time  of  his 
more  boisterous  style  —  we  may  take  what  he 
wrote  in  a  copy  of  the  first  edition  of  Leaves  of 
[  115] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Grass.  *To  H ,  this  book,  which  if  occa- 
sionally erotic,  is  never  neurotic,  nor  tommy- 
rotic'  Differ  as  we  may  about  the  soundness 
of  the  critical  dictum  we  can  hardly  dispute 
the  liveliness  of  its  phrasing. 


X 

The  following  anecdotes  illustrative  of  our 
friend's  odd  ways,  and  of  his  many  original 
and  charming  traits,  are  set  down  as  they  have 
occurred  to  the  writer,  that  is  to  say,  pretty 
much  at  random. 

Miller  was  averse  to  shaking  hands,  and  he 
also  disliked  the  conmion  forms  of  salutation 
and  leave-taking,  holding  them  to  be  both  awk- 
ward and  meaningless.  For  complete  vapidity 
he  thought  nothing  could  match  the  phrase, 
*  Well,  good-bye,  see  you  later.'  A  man  might 
better  bolt  and  say  nothing  than  sink  so  low  as 
to  say  that. 

For  his  part  he  often  bolted;  you  knew  that 
he  was  going  and  haK  an  hour  afterward  you 
were  aware  that  he  was  gone.  He  could  not  be 
said  to  steal  away  *like  the  Arabs,'  —  he  was 
too  bulky  for  that,  and  carried  too  much  lug- 
gage, —  but  he  admired  that  unconventional 
[117] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

way  of  getting  rid  of  oneself  and  to  some  extent 
practised  it. 

Arriving  after  a  period  of  months  at  a  house 
where  he  was  eagerly  expected  he  would  greet 
his  host  with  *I  was  amused  at  this,  I  was 
amused  at  this,'  —  followed  by  a  gurgle  of 
laughter  and  the  account  of  some  absurd  in- 
cident that  he  had  witnessed  in  the  street,  or 
that  had  befallen  him  on  the  train. 

Another  time  the  greeting  might  possibly 
take  this  form :  *  Just  met  old  Jabez  Smith  as  I 
was  leaving  the  station.  Have  n't  seen  him  in 
thirty  years.  Absolutely  unchanged,  ab-so- 
lutely.  Same  fringe  of  long  white  hair  at  the 
base  of  his  skull  —  hair  so  white  and  so  fine 
that  it  must  take  at  least  ten  of  his  hairs  to 
make  a  unit.  .  .  .  Jabez  Smith!  You  never 
heard  of  him,  of  course,  but  if  I  'm  not  greatly 
mistaken  Jabez  Smith  married  Philander  Do- 
little's  wife's  niece.  He  was  attorney-general 
under' — And  so  on,  and  so  forth,  save  that 
the  names  would  be  those  of  real  characters, 
I  118  ] 


Mr.  Miller  is  persuaded  to  leave  the  task  of  '  buffeting 
his  books,'  put  on  his  famous  white  beaver  hat  and  come 
out  into  the  sunshine  to  be  kodaked. 

Photo,  by  Katherine  Agnew  Martin  {Mrs.  Cerf). 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

people  of  importance  in  their  day,  the  gene- 
alogical affiliations  correctly  traced,  and  the 
illustrative  anecdotes  told  in  a  highly  enter- 
taining manner. 

A  guest  who  announces  himseK  in  this  un- 
usual style  saves  his  host  much  trouble.  The 
business  of  social  life  begins  at  once.  No  time 
is  wasted  by  the  pair  in  asking  about  the  state 
of  each  other's  health,  or  in  bewailing  the  de- 
cline of  the  lecture-platform. 

When  Miller  arrived  at  any  house  he  always 
came  bearing  gifts.  He  was  benevolent  uncle- 
at-large  to  a  vast  circle  of  acquaintance.  These 
free-will  offerings  had  to  be  paid  for  out  of  the 
proceeds  of  his  work,  and  he  never  mastered 
the  simple  truth  that,  his  income  remaining 
about  the  same  from  year  to  year,  the  more  he 
gave  the  less  he  would  have. 

His  relation  to  money  was  peculiar.  He 
seemed  to  feel  that  he  had  no  right  to  annoy  a 
dollar  by  impeding  its  natural  tendency  to  cir- 
culate. Money  bounded  off  him,  so  to  say. 
I  119  J 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Rigid  moralists  would  certainly  have  denomi- 
nated him  'spendthrift.'  He  was  not  quite 
that.  The  spendthrift,  I  take  it,  is  the  man 
who  wastes  his  money  on  private  and  question- 
able pleasures,  who  drinks  it  up,  or  gambles  it 
away,  or  devotes  it  to  making  a  vain  show. 
One  third  of  Dewitt  Miller's  money  was  ap- 
plied to  no  baser  purpose  than  the  giving  of 
pleasure  to  his  friends.  With  the  remaining 
two  thirds  he  bought  a  few  clothes,  many 
books,  and  no  end  of  railway  tickets. 

A  lady  who  knew  him  well  and  understood 
him  thoroughly  reminds  me  that  in  his  giving 
the  cost  of  the  gift  counted  in  no  particular; 
it  was  all  one  to  him  whether  he  had  paid  fif- 
teen dollars  or  fifteen  cents  for  that  which  he 
now  relinquished  to  another's  keeping.  Here 
is  an  illustration  of  his  princely  generosity,  and 
incidentally  of  the  way  in  which  his  money 
went.  He  was  showing  me  the  Sidney  Lee  re- 
print of  the  First  Folio  of  Shakespeare's  Plays, 
to  which  he  had  been  an  original  subscriber, 
[  120  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

demanding  that  I  admire  it  properly;  he  would 
accept  in  behalf  of  the  splendid  volume  no 
luke-warm  tribute  from  a  man  who  read,  and 
professed  to  admire,  Shakespeare.  *A  nice 
book,'  he  said,  patting  the  cover,  'a  very  nice 
book.' 

The  next  day  he  astonished  me  by  saying, 
*  Do  you  care  for  that  Sidney  Lee?  If  you  do 
I'll  give  it  to  you.  /  don't  care  in  the  least 
for  it.' 

Having  often  remonstrated  with  him  about 
his  incurable  habit  of  playing  tricks  with  his 
library  by  giving  away  the  only  copy  he  owned 
of  this  or  that  book,  I  remonstrated  once  more. 
He  made  no  reply,  but  it  was  quite  clear  from 
his  manner  that  he  had  determined  to  part 
with  the  folio.  He  was  a  frequent  victim  of 
such  obsessions,  and  costly  they  were  to  him, 
and  highly  profitable  to  others. 

*But  I  know  how  it  will  result,'  I  said,  con- 
cluding my  lecture;  'if  I  don't  take  the  book 
you  will  give  it  to  some  one  else.' 
[  121] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

*  Possibly  so.' 

*  In  the  circumstances  I  think  it  best  to  take 
it/  And  I  did. 

With  a  cackle  of  joy  over  the  feebleness  of 
my  opposition  he  got  the  book  down  and  wrote 
on  the  fly-leaf  a  note  to  the  effect  that  it  was 
given  me  in  commemoration  of  my  fiftieth 
birthday,  which,  happily,  had  not  then  arrived. 

This  should  be  the  end  of  the  story,  and  is 
not.  He  bethought  himself  of  his  friend  at 
*The  Orchard,'  to  whom  he  was  under  obliga- 
tions a  thousand-fold  greater  than  to  me,  and 
into  whose  keeping  if  anyone's  a  copy  of  the 
Shakespeare  should  go.  He  lost  no  time  in  put- 
ting himself  right  with  himself  in  that  quarter. 
Lastly,  he  repented  in  secret  of  having  said 
that  he  did  not  care  for  the  book  for  his  own 
library.  So  he  must  needs  buy  a  third  copy, 
otherwise  he  might  not  have  felt  quite  com- 
fortable. Three  copies  at  fifty  dollars  a  copy ! 
Small  wonder  that  his  dollars  lingered  with  him 
for  such  brief  periods  of  time. 
[  122  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Miller  had  no  knowledge  of  music,  and  little 
or  none  of  painting  and  sculpture.  A  popular 
tune,  and  that  not  always  of  the  baser  sort, 
often  caught  his  fancy,  and  he  might  be  heard 
humming  a  bar  or  two  as  he  worked  among  his 
books.  That  the  melodies  of  Arthur  Sullivan 
were  not  as  those  of  the  mob  of  comic-opera 
composers  he  well  understood,  and  he  endorsed 
a  friend's  description  of  them  as  'witty.' 

But  even  the  best  of  music  gave  him  no  acute 
pain.  He  never  wished,  with  Doctor  Johnson, 
that  a  difficult  piano-piece  had  been  so  diffi- 
cult as  to  be  impossible.  When  his  friend  J.  P. 
Lawrence  played  some  grandiose  work  by 
Schumann  or  Moszkowski  he  always  listened 
with  an  air  of  interest  and  often  made  an  appo- 
site comment.  He  relished  Lawrence's  phrase 
descriptive  of  the  art  of  an  able  but  athletic 
pianist:  *He  plays  the  polonaises  of  Chopin 
as  if  he  were  killing  a  steer.  How  he  does 
lambaste  them!' 

He  never  spoke  of  paintings  other  than  por- 
[123] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

traits,  and  these  he  knew  best  through  transla- 
tions into  black  and  white,  the  photographs 
and  engravings.  He  was  devoted  to  Tenniel, 
and  thought  all  efforts  to  make  new  illustra- 
tions for  Alice  in  Wonderland  should  be  dis- 
couraged. The  striking  symbolical  drawings 
which  E.J.  Sullivan  did  for  an  edition  of  Sartor 
Resartus  greatly  appealed  to  him.  When  he 
would  be  merry  he  turned  over  the  pages  of 
Lewis  Carroll's  Rhyme?  or  Reason?  to  enjoy  for 
the  twentieth  time  the  unspeakable  droUness 
of  A.  B.  Frost's  ghost  pictures.  He  was  also 
pleased  with  the  saintly  expressions  worn  by 
the  little  beasts  who  figure  in  The  Rubaiyat  of 
a  Persian  Kitten  by  Oliver  Herford.  Of  the 
twenty  drawings  in  Max  Beerbohm's  The 
Poets'  Corner  (that  singular  mixture  of  the 
extremely  good  and  the  extraordinarily  bad), 
he  preferred  the  one  in  which  little  Miss  Mary 
Augusta  asks  her  uncle,  Matthew  Arnold, 
why  it  is  that  he  will  not  be  'always  wholly 
serious.' 

[  124  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Political  caricature,  both  English  and  Amer- 
ican, he  thoroughly  enjoyed,  and  the  artist  had 
no  need  to  be  celebrated  who  should  win  his 
praise;  he  was  quick  to  find  out  the  merit  that 
may  easily  be  detected  in  the  work  of  quite 
obscure  men. 

Miller  was  a  mighty  reader  of  the  news- 
papers, especially  devoted  to  the  New  York 
*  Tribune,'  the  *Sun,'  the  'Evening  Post,'  the 
Boston  'Transcript,'  and  the  Springfield  'Re- 
publican.' He  was  never  without  all  five,  if 
they  could  be  had,  and  he  was  familiar  with 
almost  every  other  journal  of  note  in  the  larger 
cities  of  the  East  and  the  Middle  West.  Regu- 
larly as  the  first  of  the  year  approached  he 
placed  with  an  agent  his  subscription  for  the 
London  (weekly)  'Times,'  the  'Athenaeum' 
and  the  'Spectator,'  the  (English)  'Bookman,' 
'Punch,'  the  New  York  'Nation,'  the  'Out- 
look,' the  'Christian  Advocate,'  and  the  San 
Francisco  'Argonaut.'  To  this  list  should  be 
added  three  or  four  country  newspapers  which 
[  125  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

he  took  *for  old  sake's  sake.'  Even  then  it 
may  be  doubted  whether  the  list  is  quite  com- 
plete. One  does  not  exaggerate  in  saying  that 
throughout  this  mass  of  printed  paper  no  para- 
graph that  he  was  directly  or  remotely  inter- 
ested in  escaped  his  eye. 

He  generally  read  scissors  in  hand,  and  would 
clip  and  clip  like  an  exchange  editor.  Many  of 
the  clippings  were  kept  for  his  own  scrap-books, 
the  others  were  enclosed  in  stamped  envelopes 
and  addressed  to  the  large  number  of  people 
throughout  the  country  with  whom  he  aimed 
to  keep  in  touch.  If  you  were  interested  in 
Ruskin,  or  Disraeli,  or  the  Parsees,  or  shrimps, 
or  Salem  Gibraltars,  or  the  origin  of  the  term 
*  sea-puss,'  he  remembered  that  you  were,  re- 
membered it  for  years;  and  everythmg  that 
came  his  way  relating  to  these  topics,  went 
your  way  by  the  earliest  post.  One  gentleman, 
supposed  to  be  in  need  of  humorous  paragraphs 
and  samples  of  native  American  wit,  found 
them  coming  to  him  by  the  dozens  and  for 
[  126  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

months  on  end.  "When  finally  they  ceased  to 
arrive,  the  gentleman  remarked  that  *  Miller 
must  be  suffering  from  an  attack  of  clipper's 
cramp.' 

For  letters  Miller  often  substituted  press- 
clippings  or  longer  articles  cut  from  magazines. 
When  once  you  had  learned  to  interpret  the 
signs  the  mode  of  conmiunication  did  very  well. 
You  knew  from  the  odd  left-handed  writing 
who  was  your  correspondent.  The  postmark 
showed  that  he  was  in  Vicksburg,  or  Winnipeg, 
or  Carson  City,  and  that  he  had  thought  of  you 
in  your  dreary  place  of  exile  in  New  York  or 
Washington.  That  he  had  thought  to  some 
purpose  you  knew  from  the  enclosure,  which 
related  to  a  point  you  had  discussed  with  him 
or  a  topic  you  were  perennially  interested  in. 
That  is  all  there  was  of  it,  but  considering  the 
multitude  of  the  sendings  and  the  care  shown 
in  allotting  each  his  proper  scrap  of  print,  can 
one  say  that  it  was  a  little  thing  to  do?  We 
sometimes  grew  aweary  of  correspondence  by 
[  127  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

scissors  and  longed  for  letters.  Would  that  we 
had  the  clippings  now ! 

Our  friend  could  write  an  excellent  letter, 
—  though  he  was  neither  a  FitzGerald  nor 
a  Lowell, — but  he  did  not  always  take  the 
time  to  be  expansive  and  chatty.  Hundreds  of 
his  letters  were  no  more  than  telegrams  sent  by 
post,  highly  condensed  and  the  words  docked 
as  much  as  possible,  'sh'  meaning  shall  or 
should,  'wh'  standing  for  who,  which,  what 
and  when,  and  'th'  made  to  do  duty  for  this, 
these,  that,  those,  they,  then,  the  definite  arti- 
cle and  two  or  three  more  words.  Neverthe- 
less, Miller  always  played  fairly  in  the  game 
of  letter-writing.  When  his  correspondents 
took  pains  he  took  pains,  and  on  that  score 
they  were  generally  in  his  debt. 

No  other  man  got  quite  so  much  satisfac- 
tion as  he  out  of  the  contents  of  his  post-bag. 
Anyone  who  has  been  much  with  him  will 
remember  the  gusto  with  which  he  would  say, 
'Nice  long  letter  from  Colonel  Higginson  this 
[  128  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

morning,*  or  it  might  be  from  Professor  Nor- 
ton, or  Mrs.  Howe,  from  any  one,  in  short,  of 
the  rather  numerous  body  of  people  whom  he 
contrived  to  interest  in  him  chiefly  by  means 
of  his  sincere,  helpful,  and  intelligent  interest 
in  their  work  and  themselves.  How  he  first 
learned  that  Thomas  Hughes  had  a  hankering 
for  examples  of  all  the  pirated  American  edi- 
tions of  Tom  Brown's  School-Days  cannot 
now  be  told,  but  the  Englishman  had  reason 
to  be  glad  that  Miller  did  learn  the  fact.  In 
some  such  way  as  this  were  many  of  these 
epistolary  relations  established.  One  of  the 
last  letters  that  came  to  him  across  the  water 
was  from  a  member  of  the  Hope  family  to 
whom  he  had  written  with  the  idea  of  clearing 
up  an  obscure  point  about  Thomas  Hope  and 
'Deepdene.'  No  great  light  was,  or  could  be, 
thrown  on  the  obscure  point,  but  the  letter 
itself,  a  model  of  courtliness  and  good  episto- 
lary English,  delighted  the  recipient. 

In  his  dealings  with  London  booksellers 
[129] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Miller  enjoyed  no  feature  more  than  the  cor- 
respondence. When  their  letters  arrived,  so 
punctilious  in  tone,  worded  with  exceeding 
care,  and  written  always  with  pen  and  ink 
in  a  clerkly  hand,  he  would  read  them  aloud 
to  an  accompaniment  of  'ventral  laughs'  and 
contrast  this  elegant  way  of  doing  business 
with  the  American  letter-received-and-con- 
tents-noted  style. 

One  last  trait  apropos  of  letters  and  letter- 
writing.  Miller  rather  freely  shared  the  con- 
tents of  his  post-bag  with  friends  and  even 
acquaintances.  For  a  man  of  peculiar  fineness 
and  delicacy,  who  could  be,  if  the  need  were, 
as  close-mouthed  as  the  Sphinx,  he  has  been 
known  to  display  a  childlike  want  of  reserve  in 
the  matter  of  letters.  He  was  always  a  good 
deal  of  a  boy,  and  this  is  how  one  sometimes 
found  it  out.  No  harm  came  of  his  frankness 
that  one  can  recall,  but  many  a  laughable  com- 
plication. 


XI 

He  was  mindful  of  birthdays  and  other  an- 
niversaries both  great  and  small.  You  might 
think  that  for  once  he  had  forgotten,  but  no ; 
before  nightfall  the  telegram  which  had  failed 
you  at  breakfast-time  made  its  appearance. 
It  usually  came  out  of  the  West,  from  Iowa, 
Nebraska,  South  Dakota,  Oklahoma,  or  Texas. 
The  phrasing  was  always  ingenious,  and  if 
sometimes  a  little  stilted  was  the  more  charac- 
teristic on  that  account.  Miller  could  be  very 
felicitous  in  the  compass  of  ten  words. 

As  a  matter  of  course  he  did  not  carry  all 
these  dates  in  his  head.  He  had  a  couple  of 
birthday-books,  and  these  little  volumes  with 
their  fatally  exact  entries  were  always  within 
reach.  Trusting  ladies,  who  in  youth  had  im- 
parted to  him  the  secret  of  their  natal  day  and 
year,  sometimes  thought  they  had  reason  to 
deplore  having  done  so  when  fifteen  or  eighteen 
[  131  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

anniversaries  had  rolled  by.  But  Miller  was 
never  known  to  make  an  ungenerous  use  of  his 
knowledge. 

At  Christmas  time  there  was  a  great  out- 
pouring of  gifts,  books  for  the  most  part,  and 
subscriptions  to  certain  magazines  and  week- 
lies, the  'Century,'  *Scribner's,'  'Life,'  and  two 
or  three  journals  of  a  civilized  and  civilizing 
character.  He  had  the  odd  habit  of  anticipat- 
ing dates.  You  got  your  Christmas  offering 
some  months  before  it  was  due.  There  was 
more  of  reason  in  the  practice  than  at  first 
sight  appears.  The  holiday  season  often  found 
him  in  remote  parts  of  the  country  where  large 
book-shops  were  not,  and  he  liked  a  great  and 
varied  stock  from  which  to  choose. 

There  was  also  a  measure  of  harmless  eccen- 
tricity in  the  practice.  It  is  unusual  to  bestow 
gifts  in  this  manner,  and  our  open-handed 
friend  preferred  the  unusual  way  of  doing 
things.  There  lies  before  me  as  I  write  the  first 
of  the  sixteen  volumes  of  Horace  Walpole's 
[  132] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Letters,  in  the  superb  and  costly  Clarendon 
Press  edition,  with  an  inscription  in  Miller's 
rather  curious  hand.  The  set  of  books  was 
given  to  two  of  us,  in  honor  of  what  one  of  the 
two  regards  as  the  most  fortunate  event  of  his 
life.  The  volumes  came  into  our  possession 
eighteen  months  since,  and  four  years  have  yet 
to  elapse  before  the  arrival  of  the  particular 
anniversary  which  the  gift  is  intended  to  mark. 
Miller  parted  with  his  small  possessions  so 
readily  that  it  was  unsafe  to  comment  on  any- 
thing he  had  that  struck  your  eye ;  you  might 
be  compelled  to  take  it  away  with  you.  His 
trick  of  purchasing  the  articles  he  liked  in  du- 
plicate (if  not  by  the  dozen)  made  it  convenient 
for  him  to  give;  nothing  could  have  made  it 
easier.  He  had  a  taste  for  folding-scissors  of  a 
particular  make,  and  always  kept  a  supply  of 
them  on  hand  for  the  benefit  of  acquaintances 
who  could  appreciate  the  attention.  Every  now 
and  then  one  meets  a  member  of  the  tribe  of  va- 
grant lecturers  whom  Miller  has  distinguished 
[133] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

by  bestowing  on  him  a  pair  of  folding-scissors. 
There  are  so  many  of  us  that  we  might  form  an 
association  of  quite  respectable  size  and,  we 
trust,  of  not  a  little  collective  ability. 

Other  animals  besides  those  of  the  himian 
race  were  the  objects  of  Miller's  benevolence. 
He  delighted  in  parrots,  squirrels,  cats,  and 
dogs,  and  had  a  profound  respect  for  a  horse. 
I  well  remember  his  satisfaction  when  the  high- 
bred Angora  cat  that  dwelt  at  the  Glen  jumped 
on  his  knee  for  the  first  time  of  its  own  accord ; 
he  had  not  looked  for  so  great  an  honor.  His 
face  beamed  as  he  stroked  the  little  creature's 
head  with  his  ample  hand.  They  made  a  comi- 
cal pair  of  comrades.  Miller  being  so  very  large 
and  the  cat  so  exceedingly  small. 

Two  or  three  of  his  cat-friends  always  re- 
ceived at  Christmas  time  postal  money-orders 
(made  out  in  the  name  of  their  respective  mas- 
ters), to  the  end  that  they  might  properly 
celebrate  the  day  with  extra  portions  of  cream 
or  chunks  of  liver.  On  the  occasion  of  his  last 
[  134  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

visit  to  Boston  he  insisted  on  leaving  fifty  cents 
to  buy  holiday  meats  for  the  cat  that  guards 
the  Old  South  book-shop.  He  became  inter- 
ested in  the  account  of  a  superb  Angora  of 
marked  personality  that  two  of  his  friends  had 
met  at  a  tea-room  in  Cambridge,  England. 
*  William'  was  the  animal's  name.  Miller  pro- 
posed writing  a  letter  as  from  Leary's  cat  in 
Philadelphia  to  'William  of  Cambridge.'  I  be- 
lieve he  never  carried  out  the  project;  his 
friends  were  not  perfectly  sure  that  William's 
owners  would  see  the  humor  of  the  thing. 

He  usually  spoke  to  the  dogs  he  met  in  his 
walks,  whether  he  knew  them  or  not.  His  com- 
mon form  of  salutation  was,  'How  do  you  do, 
sir?  How  do  you  do? '  always  with  an  empha- 
sizing and  prolonging  of  the  first  word.  And 
the  animals  never  failed  to  show  how  they  did, 
in  so  far  as  they  could  express  their  thoughts  by 
eye  and  tail.  With  the  various  dogs  that  reigned 
at  'The  Orchard,'  or  governed  divers  dog  duke- 
doms at  Forest  Glen — Dan  the  Saint  Bernard, 
[  135] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

Teufel  the  alert  terrier,  Taffy  the  Pomeranian 
of  impenetrable  coat,  the  gentle  Balribbie, 
Jeames  Pitbladdo  the  Super-demonstrative, 
and  the  laughable  Raggetty  with  one  lop  ear 
—  he  was  on  terms  of  intimacy. 

Of  the  parrot  belonging  to  his  sister,  as  well 
as  of  other  parrots,  he  had  always  a  variety  of 
stories  to  tell.  He  aspired  to  become  almoner 
to  the  squirrels  that  frisked  about  the  Library, 
and  to  this  end  provided  boxes  of  nuts  for  their 
comfort,  which  the  small  boys  of  the  neighbor- 
hood promptly  emptied.  '  If  I  catch  the  little 
rascals  at  it,'  said  Miller,  ahnost  red  in  the 
face,  'I'll  dust  their  jackets  for  them.'  The 
truth  is  that  he  would  have  done  nothing  of 
the  sort;  at  the  worst  he  would  have  exhorted 
them,  in  terms  they  could  not  possibly  have 
understood. 

He  took  such  keen  delight  in  a  multitude  of 

homely  and  familiar  objects  and  activities  that 

one  never  thinks  of  him  as  requiring  what  is 

called  amusement  or  diversion.   Time  never 

[  136  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

hung  heavy  on  his  hands,  and  in  his  calendar 
a  dull  day  would  have  been  a  phenomenon. 
There  was  one  sophisticated  form  of  entertain- 
ment, however,  in  which  he  indulged  freely  in 
his  young  manhood.  Miller  played  neither 
chess  nor  whist,  nor  yet  billiards,  but  he  liked 
a  good  dramatic  performance.  From  chance 
remarks  of  his  I  take  him  to  have  been  an  ar- 
dent admirer  of  Edwin  Booth,  and  quite  incap- 
able of  losing  any  opportunity  to  hear  the  great 
tragedian.  For  Joseph  Jefferson  and  Mrs.  John 
Drew  he  had  immense  admiration.  Mrs.  Gil- 
bert and  James  Lewis  were  among  his  favor- 
ites, and  in  Richard  Mansfield's  art  he  took 
the  keenest  interest.  Among  living  players  of 
marked  gifts  there  were  few  with  whose  work 
he  had  not  some  acquaintance.  Were  I  to 
hazard  a  guess  as  to  the  sort  of  comedy  he  most 
enjoyed  I  should  say  pieces  like  *Lord  Chum- 
ley'  and  *Trelawny  of  the  Wells.'  Also  *The 
Professor's  Love  Story'  and  *The  Middleman.' 
But  he  had  a  cathoUc  taste  and  did  not  shrink 
[137] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

from  the  most  harrowing  of  dramas  provided 
the  art  was  good. 

At  one  time  in  his  life  he  enjoyed  whiling 
away  an  hour  at  a  vaudeville  show.  The  speech 
of  a  clever  black-faced  monologist  always  di- 
verted him,  and  he  maintained  that  real  gen- 
ius was  often  displayed  in  the  composition  and 
delivery  of  these  pieces.  He  preferred  to  this 
a  real  sleight-of-hand  performance,  as  show- 
ing to  what  a  pitch  of  perfection  the  human 
muscles  could  be  trained.  Feats  of  combined 
strength  and  agility,  in  the  doing  of  which  the 
performers  seemed  to  defy  and  set  aside  the 
laws  of  physics,  always  attracted  him. 

For  the  musical  part  of  the  performance  he 
did  not  greatly  care,  though  he  often  told  how 
he  heard  perhaps  the  first  public  rendition  of  a 
song  describing  the  adventures  of  an  Irishman 
who  went  to  the  bottom  of  the  sea  in  his  Sun- 
day clothes  and  was  believed  to  have  got  ex- 
ceedingly wet,  and  how  he  (Miller)  prophesied 
at  the  time  an  enormous  popularity  for  the  song. 
[  138  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Whenever  he  went  to  these  places  of  miscel- 
laneous amusement  Miller  fortified  himself 
against  boredom  by  taking  along  two  or  three 
journals  or  weeklies;  he  well  knew  what  inani- 
ties might  face  him  from  behind  the  foot-lights. 
Once  as  he  sat  in  the  front  row,  his  eyes  bent  on 
a  copy  of  the  *  Nation'  that  lay  on  his  knee,  a 
comedian  of  the  dull  but  assertive  type,  using 
a  low  but  perfectly  distinct  tone  of  voice,  in- 
terpolated in  his  speech  the  words,  *0h,  come, 
put  up  your  newspaper  and  listen.* 

Without  lifting  his  head  Miller  responded, 
in  a  tone  quite  as  low  and  quite  as  distinct, 
*When  anything  is  uttered  on  the  stage  that 
seems  to  merit  my  attention  I  shall  be  happy 
to  do  so.' 

Being  asked  by  the  friend  to  whom  he  told 
the  incident  whether  the  audience  laughed. 
Miller  replied,  *  I  doubt  whether  any  one  heard 
me,  but  I  observed  that  members  of  the  orches- 
tra were  diverted.' 

The  anecdote  suggests  a  number  of  others 
[139] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

for  which  room  cannot  possibly  be  made. 
These  unrelated  points  have  been  taken  from  a 
note-book  crowded  to  the  margins,  and  the 
best  one  can  hope  to  do  is  to  print  such  illus- 
trations of  our  friend's  ways  as  seem  distinc- 
tive, and  will  help  the  reader  in  calling  up  the 
features  he  himseK  likes  best  to  remember. 
For  example,  no  account  of  Miller  would  be 
complete  that  failed  to  mention  his  enthusiasm 
on  the  subject  of  the  care  of  the  body. 

Yet  he  was  not,  as  might  be  inferred,  a  fre- 
quenter of  gymnasiums  or  fencing  schools  or 
riding  academies.  The  only  systematic  physi- 
cal exercise  I  have  ever  known  him  to  take  was 
walking.  He  was  strong  on  his  feet  and  seem- 
ingly good  for  any  mmiber  of  miles.  I  cannot 
recall  a  time  when  he  gave  signs  of  being  tired 
from  walking.  He  would  sweat  prodigiously 
during  this  exercise,  and  if  he  did  not  exactly 
'lard  the  lean  earth'  after  the  manner  of  Fal- 
staff,  he  came  near  to  doing  so.  Among  his 
firm  convictions  was  this,  that  his  always  ex- 
[  140  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

cellent  health  might  be  largely  attributed  to 
the  ease  with  which  he  perspired. 

He  walked  with  so  rapid  a  step  that  it  was 
trying  work  to  keep  up  with  him.  When  three 
or  four  were  of  the  party  he  was  half  the  time 
yards  ahead  of  the  others,  finding  a  moderate 
pace  difficult  and  sauntering  impossible.  When 
sunmioned  to  halt  so  that  all  might  get  to- 
gether, he  would  stand  and  mark  time,  as  if  he 
positively  must  find  an  outlet  for  his  superflu- 
ous energy. 

In  certain  ways  he  gave  much  attention  to 
the  care  of  his  health,  had  himseK  examined 
from  time  to  time  by  one  of  his  friends  in  the 
medical  profession,  and  might  be  seen  on  rare 
occasions  taking  minute  quantities  of  medi- 
cine —  so  minute  that  you  wondered  whether 
his  system  knew  that  anything  was  being  done 
to  it.  *  Doctor  Hatfield,'  he  would  say  (or  it 
might  be  Doctor  Faught),  'discovers  that  I 
have  a  slight  tendency  to  something-or-other, 
and  he  is  correcting  it.'  He  was  never  as  vague 
[  141  ] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

as  this,  however,  and  rolled  out  scientific  ter- 
minology in  quite  a  learned  manner. 

On  the  other  hand  Miller  may  be  said  to 
have  paid  a  minimum  amount  of  attention  to 
hygienic  laws,  for  he  took  all  sorts  of  liberties 
with  himself,  ate  anything  he  pleased,  often  the 
strangest  combinations  of  viands,  and  declared 
that  the  surest  way  to  catch  something  was 
to  go  in  constant  fear  of  catching  it.  What  a 
naive  thing  he  could  do  on  occasion  the  follow- 
ing anecdote  will  show.  While  lecturing  in 
Tennessee  and  Kentucky  during  the  rainy 
month  of  February  he  caught  a  hard  cold.  The 
physician  whom  he  consulted  in  Cincinnati 
said  to  him,  'Mr.  Miller,  you  are  dressed  too 
warmly.  This  overcoat  you  are  wearing  is 
heavier  than  you  need.'  Miller  at  once  dis- 
carded the  garment,  bought  a  much  lighter 
overcoat,  and  went  up  among  the  deep  snow- 
drifts of  central  and  northern  Michigan  to  fill 
his  engagements  there. 

It  was  a  novel  way  of  curing  a  cold,  and 
[  142  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

proved  effective  in  his  case.  He  seemed  to  his 
friends  the  embodiment  of  physical  health. 
One  who  knew  him  well  for  many  years  said, 
*I  expected  Miller  to  bury  us  all,  lament  our 
departure  in  his  brotherly  but  philosophical 
style,  and  go  right  on  placidly  collecting  books 
until  he  was  eighty-five  or  ninety.' 


XII 

He  spent  the  month  of  May,  1911,  at  Forest 
Glen,  with  his  friends  and  his  books,  and  was 
in  perfect  health  and  the  best  of  spirits.  Wher- 
ever one  saw  him  —  in  the  private  dining-room 
with  Mr.  Cassedy  during  the  long  after-dinner 
talks  that  both  men  enjoyed  so  much;  at  the 
joyful  Sunday  morning  breakfasts  with  Mr. 
and  Mrs.  Partington;  in  numberless  chats  with 
other  favorites  of  his  among  the  faculty,  Miss 
Priest,  Miss  Munford,  and  Miss  Bomberger; 
at  the  many  entertainments  the  season  brings 
—  one  saw  an  entirely  happy  man.  It  is  be- 
lieved now  that  he  had  some  private  worries; 
if  so,  he  knew  how  to  conceal  them. 

His  summer  plans  included  a  trip  to  the 
Pacific  coast,  with  two  lectures  at  Boise,  Idaho, 
en  route.  Not  being  due  in  the  West  until  early 
July  he  outstayed  the  other  guests  of  the  Glen 
household.  True  to  his  lifelong  habit  he  took 
[144] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

the  latest  train  that  would  ensure  his  arriving 
on  time  at  the  point  where  the  first  lecture 
was  to  be  given.  The  hot  and  wearing  jour- 
ney may  have  told  on  him,  seasoned  traveller 
though  he  was. 

After  the  lectures  at  the  Boise  Chautauqua 
he  was  found  to  be  in  no  state  to  continue  his 
journey  and  the  California  engagements  were 
cancelled.  By  the  advice  of  the  physician, 
Doctor  Smith,  he  removed  from  the  hotel  to 
Saint  Luke's  Hospital.  Self-willed  as  always,  he 
packed  his  suit-case  with  his  own  hands  and 
carried  it  down  stairs  to  the  hotel-office.  The 
news  of  his  illness  was  wired  to  Forest  Glen, 
and  thence  to  other  points.  Mr.  Cassedy  took 
prompt  measures  to  secure  Miller's  entire  free- 
dom from  worries  of  a  financial  sort.  Telegrams 
of  sympathy  poured  in  upon  him,  and  a  num- 
ber of  the  friends  he  loved  most  offered  to  go  to 
him  at  once  if  they  could  be  of  service.  He 
declined  gratefully  their  help;  it  was  a  long 
journey  to  Idaho,  and  he  was  *  doing  well.' 
[145] 


DEWITT  MILLER 

There  was  certainly  no  lack  of  sympathetic 
care  or  of  skillful  treatment  on  the  part  of 
the  excellent  people  into  whose  hands  he  had 
fallen. 

It  is  worth  noting  as  typical  of  Miller's 
thoughtfulness  that  he  would  not  allow  the 
hospital  note-paper  to  be  used  when  word  was 
sent  to  his  sister;  he  was  particularly  anxious 
that  she  should  not  be  unduly  alarmed. 

All  who  had  to  do  with  the  case  believed 
that  his  recovery  was  only  a  question  of  time 
and  care,  and  that  in  a  few  weeks  he  would  be 
on  his  feet  again.  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Wilson  had 
planned  to  bring  him  to  their  bungalow  at  Lake 
Mahopac  as  soon  as  he  was  able  to  make  the 
journey,  and  he  looked  forward  with  eagerness 
to  the  weeks  of  convalescence  there.  He  pen- 
cilled a  few  notes  to  a  number  of  his  intimates. 
I  have  one  that  was  written  three  days  before 
he  died.  'I'm  getting  along,'  he  says,  *  though 
there  be  days  that  are  very  wearisome,  and 
nights  that  have  no  mornings.' 
[  146  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

Heart-failure  was  the  immediate  cause  of  his 
death.  He  literally  slept  himself  away  in  the 
night  (July  29,  1911).  His  physician  could 
hardly  believe  it  possible,  when  the  news  was 
telephoned  him;  he  had  convinced  himself 
that  if  any  patient  could  get  well  this  patient 
could. 

Our  friend  was  buried  from  the  little  Metho- 
dist Church  of  Katonah,  New  York,  on  the 
afternoon  of  August  7.  All  the  arrangements 
for  the  service  and  the  flowers  (there  was  a 
wealth  of  them)  fell  to  the  care  of  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Wilson.  On  them  too  devolved  the  most  try- 
ing duty  of  all  —  making  known  to  Mrs.  Webb 
the  news  of  her  loss.  Needless  to  say,  it  was 
discharged  with  perfect  tact  and  delicacy.  The 
flag  on  the  viUage  green  was  at  half-mast,  for 
Miller  was  known  there  and  beloved.  Friends 
came  from  distant  points :  Mr.  Cassedy,  Miss 
Priest,  and  Mr.  Partington  from  Forest  Glen, 
Doctor  Wilbur  L.  Davidson  and  Mr.  Paul 
I^mperly  from  Cleveland,  the  Reverend  Mr. 
[147] 


:  DEWITT  MILLER 

Hershey  from  Rochester,  the  Reverend  Town- 
send  Russell  and  Mrs.  Russell  from  Washing- 
ton. 

The  service  of  the  Episcopal  Church  was 
read  by  Mr.  Russell,  Mrs.  Wilson  sang,  a 
prayer  was  offered  by  Mr.  Davidson,  and  then, 
says  my  correspondent,  came  the  farewell  *  in 
*the  unaffected  and  tender  words  of  Francis 
*  Wilson,  that  made  the  heart  beat  fast  almost 
*to  breaking.' 

The  Committal  service  was  read  at  the  grave 
in  the  little  cemetery  of  Cross  River  by  Mr. 
Russell,  in  the  presence  of  these  friends  and  of 
Miller's  sister  and  grand-niece,  his  only  sur- 
viving relatives.  He  lies  near  his  father  and 
mother.  The  granite  boulder  that  is  to  mark  his 
grave  will  bear  a  bronze  tablet  with  the  name 
and  dates,  and  a  stanza  from  Whittier's  poem, 
*The  Eternal  Goodness,'  —  a  poem  which  had 
often  comforted  him  as  it  had  comforted  others 
in  the  turmoil  of  this  life. 

His  death  can  mean  nothing  to  that  great 
[  148  ] 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH 

world  which  he  studied  with  unflagging  inter- 
est for  so  many  years,  but  what  it  means  to 
those  who  knew  him  they  alone  are  able  to 
understand. 


20088 


,>*' SOUTHERN  REGIO-,; 


A     000  689  025     5 


